No Exit Quotes

“The difference between a hero and a victim? Timing.”
― Taylor Adams, No Exit

“History doesn’t quite repeat itself, but damn, it sure can rhyme.”
― Taylor Adams, No Exit

“Sometimes God puts people exactly where they need to be. Even when they don’t know it.”
― Taylor Adams, No Exit

“The easiest lies to tell are the true ones.”
― Taylor Adams, No Exit

“Don’t fear the pros. The pros know what they’re doing, and do it cleanly. Fear the amateurs.”
― Taylor Adams, No Exit

“Darby preferred to live her life wide-eyed, tormented, running, because nothing can catch you if you never stop.”
― Taylor Adams, No Exit

“There’s refuge in normalcy — if you can hold onto it.”
― Taylor Adams, No Exit

“Inhale. Count to five. Exhale. Forward motion.”
― Taylor Adams, No Exit

“Excuses are poison,” Ed repeated. “Doing the right thing is hard. Talking yourself out of it is easy.”
― Taylor Adams, No Exit

“Death is supposed to transform you from a person into an idea.”
― Taylor Adams, No Exit

“the only thing that stops a bad guy with a gun is a good guy with a gun.”
― Taylor Adams, No Exit

“You want to know the secret to ruining your life? It's never one big black-and-white decision. It's dozen's of little ones that you make every single day. It's excuses, in my case. Excuses are poison”
― Taylor Adams, No Exit

“You’re the sum of every trait I’ve ever hated in a human being.”
― Taylor Adams, No Exit

“Too much caffeine, not enough sleep. This wasn’t a movie. This was just real life.”
― Taylor Adams, No Exit

“Up and down lost all meaning. Her world became a violent tumble-dryer, an endless, crashing kaleidoscope.”
― Taylor Adams, No Exit

“She remembered walking back from there last month, half-drunk with a gaggle of half-friends from her dorm, and when one of them asked her (only half-giving a shit) where she’d planned to go for Christmas break, Darby had answered bluntly: that it would require an act of God Himself to make her come back home to Utah. And apparently He’d been listening, because He’d blessed Darby’s mother with late-stage pancreatic cancer.”
― Taylor Adams, No Exit

“a piteous creature that wore so many masks, he didn’t even know what he looked like beneath them.”
― Taylor Adams, No Exit

“Then, like a levee breaking, it all came out: “I took advantage of her. I manipulated her. I called her horrible things. I stole her car once, with a shoelace. I’d leave, for days at a time, without telling her where I’d gone or who I was out with. I must have given her ulcers. When I . . . when I left for college, we didn’t even say goodbye. I just got in my Honda and drove to Boulder. I stole a bottle of her gin from the cabinet on my way out.”
― Taylor Adams, No Exit

“Tonight had been a swirling, sweaty shitstorm of blind chance and left-field surprises. Not”
― Taylor Adams, No Exit

“The time she dreamt that her throat closed up in seventh grade Social Studies class and she vomited a three-inch maggot, pale and bloated, writhing on her desk? 3: 21 a.m. The time a man stalked her on her way to 7-Eleven, whistling at her, and then cornered her in the restroom, produced a tiny handgun, and shot her in the back of the head? 3: 33 a.m. The time that tall ghost —a gray-haired woman with a floral skirt and double-jointed knees, both bending backward like a dog’s hind legs —came lurching through Darby’s bedroom window, half-floating and half-striding, weightless and ethereal, like a creature underwater? 3: 00 a.m. exactly.”
― Taylor Adams, No Exit

“Like popping knuckles.”
― Taylor Adams, No Exit

“You’re the reason Dad left us. And if I could have chosen him instead of you, I would have. In a heartbeat. In a fucking heartbeat, Maya. Before hanging up, her mother had answered: If he really wanted you, Darby, he would have taken you. She sipped her cocoa again. Lukewarm.”
― Taylor Adams, No Exit

“I’ll hurt you even worse, Rodent Face. I’ll take your gun. Then I’ll kill Ashley with it. This girl is going home. Tonight.”
― Taylor Adams, No Exit

“She ran the wrong way.” Ashley pointed downhill with the gun. “See? Dumb bitch is going north. Deeper into the woods.”
― Taylor Adams, No Exit

“shouldn’t have given her that knife. What if, by intervening tonight, I made things worse? What if I got Jay killed?”
― Taylor Adams, No Exit

“A suspect description and a blurry, half-assed photo wouldn’t be good enough. It would be enough for the media to brand her a hero if things worked out nicely, but it wasn’t enough to guarantee Jay’s rescue.”
― Taylor Adams, No Exit

“It’s always the nice guy,” Ashley said. “Again, I don’t really read, but I’ve seen a lot of movies, and that’s even better. Whoever seems like the nicest character, at first, will always turn out to be the asshole in the end.”
― Taylor Adams, No Exit

“She backed up, past the green stalls, past paul takes it in the ass,”
― Taylor Adams, No Exit

“If you weren’t the harbinger of my death before, she thinks, you probably are now.”
― Taylor Adams, No Exit

“Ashley kissed him on the lips.”
― Taylor Adams, No Exit