The Gods of Gotham Quotes

“Because I'm still here. I got a brick, a leather strap, and a rock from a slingshot too, all on a shelf. But look at me. I'm right here.”
― Lyndsay Faye, The Gods of Gotham

“Nothing is as bad as it seems,' I thought with the last remnants of my dense optimism. It couldn't be. I'd already lost everything once, I'd been ten, and so had countless other people I knew, and they all picked up and kept going. Or they picked up and went in a slightly different direction.”
― Lyndsay Faye, The Gods of Gotham

“Elections decide which horde of rats gets to gnaw at the bones.”
― Lyndsay Faye, The Gods of Gotham

“His eyes flew back at me and I could see whole civilizations, cities that he'd built and cherished and planned for, like the model of an entire world, all crumbling.”
― Lyndsay Faye, The Gods of Gotham

“And that was when I realized that she was actually a very good liar. Only good liars are surprised at being caught.”
― Lyndsay Faye, The Gods of Gotham

“People tell me things they shouldn’t. Things they ought to be powdering over, shoveling underground, facts they ought to be stuffing into a carpetbag before dropping into the river and quietly drowning.”
― Lyndsay Faye, The Gods of Gotham

“If Mercy Underhill were any more perfect, it would take a long day's work to fall in love with her. But she has exactly enough faults to make it ridiculously easy.”
― Lyndsay Faye, The Gods of Gotham

“Never have I seen a deadlier-looking collection of firemen, street brawlers, Party thugs, and fighting entrepreneurs in my life, and they made Chief Matsell's hiring practices pretty clear. If you were loyal to the Party or maybe even a good watchman, you could wear a copper star. If you looked like you've killed a man with your bare hands and aren't shy about doing it again, you could be a captain.”
― Lyndsay Faye, The Gods of Gotham

“What private atrocities cower behind closed doors when an organization is beholden to a man and not to God?”
― Lyndsay Faye, The Gods of Gotham

“He wore a white gown now, facing the free-stone ceiling, a cloth pulled up to his breast. You couldn't take him for sleeping, though, not when you've seen death before. Dead things looked heavy. Earthbound in a way living things don't.”
― Lyndsay Faye, The Gods of Gotham

“Herself the crown jewel, of course. Brittle as cut stone, and about as likely as diamonds to crack. Clear and cold and perfect-looking. And the only thing I could count on, the only weapon at my disposal, was the fact that I could see clean through her.”
― Lyndsay Faye, The Gods of Gotham

“Her head didn't even turn. Escorting Mercy down a block, depending on her mood, you might not be there for all attention she pays you. And I'm not exactly Sunday, so to speak. I've never been a special occasion. I'm all of the other days in the work week, and there are plenty of us streaming by without notice.”
― Lyndsay Faye, The Gods of Gotham

“There was someplace urgent he needed to be, and he wasn't going to make it there on time. It was a gorgeous calamity in scale, I thought. A lovely misfortune. Immediate and irreversible and very soon forgotten. We needed more troubles like that.”
― Lyndsay Faye, The Gods of Gotham

“Hope, I’ve discovered, is a sad nuisance. Hope is a horse with a broken leg. Inside the cathedral,”
― Lyndsay Faye, The Gods of Gotham

“Three hundred pages of cotton-soft parchment, bound up with a green ribbon. Her writing gushed in watery ripples over the pages, penmanship that called to mind the maddest intricate Belgian lace. Wrought on a pin's head but stretching for miles if unraveled.”
― Lyndsay Faye, The Gods of Gotham

“Nobody chased her. But that was nobody's fault, really, not in a city of this size. It was only the callousness of four hundred thousand people, blending into a single blue-black pool of unconcern. That's what we copper stars are for, I think... to be the few who stop and look.”
― Lyndsay Faye, The Gods of Gotham

“The spread of flash talk to the general population would prove to be a permanent shift in the English language. When you say “so long” to your “pal” in parting, you are participating in a subversive cultural phenomenon dating back to 1530 and the Derbyshire scoundrels who first developed a secret language all their own.”
― Lyndsay Faye, The Gods of Gotham

“And here you are, another practical sort - neither Catholic nor Protestant, nor wicked, I think. Let us pray that you are not one of a kind, as in my experience your type tend to be o' tremendous use to God.”
― Lyndsay Faye, The Gods of Gotham