Michael > Michael's Quotes

“How much more courage it took to be kind than to be cruel.”
― Louise Penny, How the Light Gets In

“Do you know what I’ve learned, after three decades of death?” Gamache asked, leaning toward the agent and lowering his voice. Despite himself, the agent leaned forward. “I’ve learned how precious life is.”
― Louise Penny, How the Light Gets In

“Why do decent young men and women become bullies? Why do soldiers dream of being heroes but end up abusing prisoners and shooting civilians? Why do politicians become corrupt? Why do cops beat suspects senseless and break the laws they’re meant to protect?”
― Louise Penny, How the Light Gets In

“Corruption and brutality are modeled and expected and rewarded. It becomes normal. And anyone who stands up to it, who tells them it’s wrong, is beaten down. Or worse.”
― Louise Penny, How the Light Gets In

“Matthew 10:36,” he’d said. “And a man’s foes shall be they of his own household. Never forget that, Agent Lacoste.”
― Louise Penny, How the Light Gets In

“A therapist has to have clear boundaries, even with former clients. People already get into our heads—if they also get into our lives, there’s a problem.”
― Louise Penny, How the Light Gets In

“Do you know, Armand, I can’t remember the last time I felt safe.” “I know what you mean,” said Gamache. “It feels as though this has been going on forever.” “No, I don’t mean just this mess. I mean all my life.”
― Louise Penny, How the Light Gets In

“But, like peace, comfort didn’t come from hiding away or running away. Comfort first demanded courage.”
― Louise Penny, How the Light Gets In

“Thinking you’re not in trouble and not being in trouble are two different things.”
― Craig Johnson, Kindness Goes Unpunished

“I leaned forward with my elbows on my knees and her book in my hands. Like a lot of things in my life, I'd just about worn it out, but it was worn out with love, and that's the best kind of worn-out there is. Maybe we're like all those used cars, broken hand tools, articles of old clothing, scratched record albums, and dog-eared books. Maybe there really isn't any such thing as mortality; that life simply wears us out with love.”
― Craig Johnson, Kindness Goes Unpunished

“I never got over that blunt feeling that life really will catch up with you.”
― Aric Davis, Tunnel Vision

“Some mornings, good memories and cereal are all you have to help you get by.”
― Aric Davis, Tunnel Vision

“There were dead kids on the news all the time and school shootings and jealous boyfriends and abusive parents and texting and driving and a million other things,”
― Aric Davis, Tunnel Vision

“Remembering you came from nothing and every day is a blessing is a fine place to be, especially in times like this.”
― Aric Davis, Tunnel Vision

“Most people follow the path wherever it leads them. Others hack their own way through the brush and always seem to end up on higher ground.”
― P.B. Ryan, Still Life With Murder

“since people who “discovered” bodies in odd places were often the people who had put them there in the first place.”
― Laurie R. King, The Art of Detection

“Meanwhile, I have the cats, and, worst of all, I’ve started to consider them family. I know guys aren’t supposed to like cats (out here, you still occasionally find the stout masculine type who goes out and shoots cats), but I can’t help it. They’ve won me over.”
― Ed Gorman, The Day the Music Died

“because no matter how we try to explain it—through religion or randomness, it doesn’t matter—existence just doesn’t seem to make any sense.”
― Ed Gorman, The Day the Music Died

“I had a philosophy instructor at the U of I say that the only question that mattered in all of philosophy was Verlaine’s “Why are we born to suffer and die?”
― Ed Gorman, The Day the Music Died

“Even if it all ultimately means nothing, you’ve got to play the game not only for yourself but for the people you love.”
― Ed Gorman, The Day the Music Died

“Maybe life didn’t make sense but then it was our business, I guess, to impose meaning on it.”
― Ed Gorman, The Day the Music Died

“I guess I had, too, this melancholy, and somehow Buddy Holly dying at least gave me a tangible reason for this feeling. Maybe it’s just all the sadness I see in the people around me, just below the surface I mean, and the fact that there’s nothing I can do about it. Life is like that sometimes.”
― Ed Gorman, The Day the Music Died

“But it is the moment when something appears as if out of nowhere, when a work of art carries within itself the thrill of invention, of discovery, that is worth listening for. It’s that moment when a song or a performance is its own manifesto, issuing its own demands on life in its own, new language—which, though the charge of novelty is its essence, is immediately grasped by any number of people who will swear they never heard anything like it before—that speaks. In rock ’n’ roll, this is a moment that, in historical time, is repeated again and again, until, as culture, it defines the art itself.”
― Greil Marcus, History of Rock 'n' Roll in Ten Songs

“It was the invention in the music that was so striking —the will to create what had never been heard before, through vocal tricks, rhythmic shifts, pieces of sound that didn’t logically follow one from the other, that didn’t make musical or even emotional sense when looked at as pieces, but as a whole spoke a new language.”
― Greil Marcus, History of Rock 'n' Roll in Ten Songs

“One thing that old blues records teach you, is that even people with very limited skills can play very personal, distinctive, and appealing music that has nothing to do with the extent of their technique. It was their artistry. It was their feeling.”
― Greil Marcus, History of Rock 'n' Roll in Ten Songs

“The only thing that rock & roll did not get from country and blues was a sense of consequences,” the writer Bill Flanagan said to Neil Young in 1986.”
― Greil Marcus, History of Rock 'n' Roll in Ten Songs

“Yet “nothing” is not quite Faulkner’s last word, only the next to the last. In the end, the negativist is no nihilist, for he affirms the void.”
― Greil Marcus, History of Rock 'n' Roll in Ten Songs

“Punk was just a single, venomous one-syllable, two-syllable phrase of anger—which was necessary to reignite rock & roll. But sooner or later, someone was going to want to say more than fuck you.”
― Greil Marcus, History of Rock 'n' Roll in Ten Songs

“Someone was going to want to say, I’m fucked.”
― Greil Marcus, History of Rock 'n' Roll in Ten Songs

“There is always a social explanation for what we see in art,” Albert Camus said in 1947. “Only it doesn’t explain anything important.”
― Greil Marcus, History of Rock 'n' Roll in Ten Songs