Wanted Quotes

“He was friendly as a warm bowl of soup. An affable guy, he always had a dimpled smile on his face and lived life unplagued by want.”
― Joseph G. Peterson, Wanted: Elevator Man

“Perhaps that's what she caught, not Life Fatigue but just grief over a broken heart--and the bitterness that comes with being cheated too early of something true--like a young husband's love.”
― Joseph G. Peterson, Wanted: Elevator Man

“Several died the day the bomb was dropped. Some lived six months after the explosion but died anyway. They were all lost. It was so long ago, young man. To you it is a history story. To me it is my life.”
― Joseph G. Peterson, Wanted: Elevator Man

“To have luck and fail to act on it is tantamount to not having luck at all. In fact, it was worse. Barnes thought back to his self-help manuals. They all proclaimed with compelling force the necessity of recognizing opportunity then seizing it when it stuck.”
― Joseph G. Peterson, Wanted: Elevator Man

“He felt entombed and stifled and desperately craved oxygen. He vainly raised the question: Why have you forsaken me?

'Call my mother,' he yelled. He had meant to say: I'm dying. Please call a priest.

The shadowy Presence, who had been in a panic, rushed over to him and, disregarding the fact that it was live, pushed the cable aside.

'You're alive,' the Presence said in breathless tones. 'Mamma's here to help.'

The elevator continued to descend, creating a vacuum. Barnes gasped for breath.

'Breathe in, breathe out,' the Presence urged. She tapped his pulse rapidly with two fingers. 'Come on, you can do it. One, two, three. Breathe in. Mamma's here to help.' ... In his delirium he thought that indeed his mother was here to help. However, in all of Barnes's twenty-nine years of so-called living, his mother had never come so comfortingly close as this.”
― Joseph G. Peterson, Wanted: Elevator Man

“Barnes looked at her card once again. He held it in his hand. He scrutinized it for a watermark--but there wasn't even that. Just her name, her number, and that strange mantra: 'love you.”
― Joseph G. Peterson, Wanted: Elevator Man

“Coneybeare didn't put his cigarette out. He merely let it slip from between his long fingers, and it fell down the space between the stairs. Barnes watched, dismayed at the distance, as the red ember disappeared in the darkness, and then, like Coneybeare, he did the same, dropping his cigarette and counting one one thousand, two one thousand, as it fell, a disappearing red dot in the darkness below.”
― Joseph G. Peterson, Wanted: Elevator Man

“The bus was crowded, standing room only, and he clung apelike from a bar that hung down from the ceiling. It was humiliating to be packed in with all these people; it reminded him of a cattle car or worse, a sardine can, or worse...but what could be worse than this?”
― Joseph G. Peterson, Wanted: Elevator Man