The Last Policeman Quotes

“Because as any writer will tell you, an IDEA for a book is like falling in love, it’s all wild emotion and headlong rush, but the ACTUAL ACT of writing a book is like building a relationship: it is joyous, slow, fragile, frustrating, exhilarating, painstaking, exhausting, worth it.”
― Ben H. Winters, The Last Policeman

“There is little novelty in the detective who cannot solve himself.”
― Ben H. Winters, The Last Policeman

“He books it into that little playground there. I mean the guy is zooming like the Road Runner, skidding through the gravel and the slush and everything. I’m yelling, “Police, police! Stop, motherfucker!”

‘You do not yell, “Stop, motherfucker.”’

‘I do. Because you know, Palace, this is it. This is the last chance I get to run after a perp yelling, “Stop, motherfucker.”
― Ben H. Winters, The Last Policeman

“The end of the world changes everything, from a law-enforcement perspective.”
― Ben H. Winters, The Last Policeman

“People’s inability to face up to this thing is worse than the thing, it really is.”
― Ben H. Winters, The Last Policeman

“He's weeping, his face dissolving in his hands. It's exhausting. People hiding behind the asteroid, like it's an excuse for poor conduct, for miserable and desperate and selfish behavior, everybody ducking in its comet-tail like children in mommy's skirts.”
― Ben H. Winters, The Last Policeman

“No. Skeve is not any kind of terrorist. He’s an idiot.” “The overlapping Venn-diagram section of those two categories, you will find, can be quite large.”
― Ben H. Winters, The Last Policeman

“It’s such a fine line with people, whether they’re playing dumb or being dumb.”
― Ben H. Winters, The Last Policeman

“The dream that I've been having, about my high-school sweetheart, is not really about my high-school sweetheart, when you get right down to it. It's not a dream about Alison Koechner and our lost love and the precious little three-bedroom house in Maine we might have built together, had things gone a different way. I am not dreaming of white picket fences and Sunday crosswords and warm tea.

There's no asteroid in the dream. In the dream, life continues. Simple life, happy and white-picket lined or otherwise. Mere life. Goes on.

When I'm dreaming of Alison Koechner, what I'm dreaming of is not dying.”
― Ben H. Winters, The Last Policeman

“I don’t know.” I shake my head slowly, look out the window at the parking lot, lift my cup of coffee for one final sip. “I feel like I wasn’t made for these times.” “I don’t know, kid,” she says. “I think maybe you’re the only person who was.”
― Ben H. Winters, The Last Policeman

“You know what I’m doing right now?” I say, watching the muddy liquid rush toward the edge of the table. “I’m thinking: Oh no! The coffee’s going to spill onto the floor! I’m so worried! Let’s keep talking about it!” And then the coffee waterfalls over the side of the desk, splashing on Andreas’s shoes and pooling on the ground beneath the desk. “Oh, look at that,” I say. “It happened anyway.” *”
― Ben H. Winters, The Last Policeman

“But that’s how it works: no matter what the odds of a given event, that one-in-whatever-it-is has to come in at some point, or it wouldn’t be a one-in-whatever chance. It would be zero.”
― Ben H. Winters, The Last Policeman

“The perseverance in this world, despite it all, of things done right.”
― Ben H. Winters, The Last Policeman

“this is the sort of person I’ve always admired: the person with a difficult goal who takes the necessary steps to achieve it.”
― Ben H. Winters, The Last Policeman

“Still, the conscientious detective is obliged to examine the question of motive in a new light, to place it within the matrix of our present unusual circumstance.”
― Ben H. Winters, The Last Policeman

“tune out the terror and the dread, in a world where the idea of long-term consequences had magically disappeared.”
― Ben H. Winters, The Last Policeman

“She keeps talking, and I keep listening, writing down every word she says, even as some hungry part of my mind flies off into a corner, huddles with this new information—a morphine addict, some kind of opiate, for a period—and begins to chew on it, taste its marrow, decide how it might be digested. Decide if it’s true.”
― Ben H. Winters, The Last Policeman

“When I’m dreaming of Alison Koechner, what I’m dreaming of is not dying. Okay? See? I get it.”
― Ben H. Winters, The Last Policeman

“She’s like a picture of our mother that someone crumpled up and tried to smooth out again.”
― Ben H. Winters, The Last Policeman

“You want to pray to someone, pray to Bruce Willis in Armageddon.”
― Ben H. Winters, The Last Policeman

“Aren’t we all depressed, Detective? Under the weight of all this unbearable immanence?”
― Ben H. Winters, The Last Policeman

“No action comes divorced from motive, neither in art nor in life.”
― Ben H. Winters, The Last Policeman

“An investigation's proper course cannot be mapped in advance. It follows each piece of information forward to the next one.”
― Ben H. Winters, The Last Policeman

“the sun struggling to make itself known outside through the dampening gray of the low-hanging clouds. I’ve got a pretty decent view out here, especially first thing in the morning: a nice little copse of winter pine, the farmland beyond, deer tracks dancing across the snow.”
― Ben H. Winters, The Last Policeman

“It's an attempted murder. It's a suicide, but you're attempting to make it seem like a murder.”
― Ben H. Winters, The Last Policeman

“Maia, we now know, is going to land in Indonesia. They”
― Ben H. Winters, The Last Policeman

“He looks up at the sound of the gravel crunch on the driveway, and I catch a flash of impression, a reclusive animal surprised in his lair by the arrival of the hunters.”
― Ben H. Winters, The Last Policeman

“most reliable scientific predictions, at least half the planet’s population will die in a series of interlocking cataclysms.”
― Ben H. Winters, The Last Policeman

“Then he’s got one shelf where all the personal stuff sits, as if quarantined,”
― Ben H. Winters, The Last Policeman

“OPEC stopped exporting oil in early November, the Canadians followed suit a couple of weeks later, and that was it. The Department of Energy opened the Strategic Petroleum Reserve on January 15, along with strictly enforced price controls, and everybody had gas for about nine days, and then they didn’t anymore.”
― Ben H. Winters, The Last Policeman