Blood Standard Quotes

“I held my breath as the door swung open and Meg Shaw stood in a spill of light from a Tiffany lamp. Her dress was ivory and sequined and it clung in exactly the right places to do me harm. White pumps and sheer stockings. Charm bracelet and a fine silver chain at her neck. Lucky I didn’t knock her out thrusting the posies in convulsive reflex.”
― Laird Barron, Blood Standard

“I may be a barbarian, but never a Luddite.”
― Laird Barron, Blood Standard

“I’m comfortable with old, old places, places hostile to evolved life.”
― Laird Barron, Blood Standard

“Hey, Uncle Eli. Don’t tell my dad I dance, huh?” She squinted up at me, trying for coquettishness but accomplishing mostly sloshed.”
― Laird Barron, Blood Standard

“Her perfume and liquor scent made my stomach queasy. Whatever pills she mixed with alcohol couldn’t be healthy. She smelled like half the girlfriends of mafiosos did after they’d succumbed to the reality of their purgatorial existence.”
― Laird Barron, Blood Standard

“I think he’s talking to you, Lionel,” I said, sotto voce.”
― Laird Barron, Blood Standard

“So where were we?” He lit a cigarette. A Benson & Hedges man. “You were telling me that this is the beginning of a beautiful friendship. All I have to do is spy on the villains to prove my good intentions. That’s where this is going, right? I’m presuming you’re part of the gang task force.” “Would you do it?” “Be your fly on the wall in the House of Love?” “Yes.” “I am not interested in becoming an FBI asset. Also known as a dead man walking.”
― Laird Barron, Blood Standard

“Harriet was lean and graceful in a white summer dress that demonstrated her legs to good effect. An elegant lady; mildly effervescent in the manner Norma Jean had been in her time, with a curled blonde bob and Nordic blue eyes. Twenty years my senior, her smoldering sex appeal hit like a punch to the sternum. That appeal wasn’t ornamental; she deployed it like a weapon. At point-blank range, the strength of her personality crackled even more so than the charm she’d radiated in a score of thriller and crime flicks. A consummate performer, she’d switched between damsel in distress and femme fatale with ease.”
― Laird Barron, Blood Standard

“It went as I expected, which was satisfactory and tragic by degrees. Charles sat amidst his so-called pals, enduring their japes, his face red as a brick.”
― Laird Barron, Blood Standard

“Kari stared at me with an expression either inscrutable or vacuous.”
― Laird Barron, Blood Standard

“Thankfully for both of us, Kari gave deduction up as a bad job right away.”
― Laird Barron, Blood Standard

“I cleared my throat and struggled not to fidget. Getting punched in the face was always a joy by comparison to giving a woman a free shot at one’s heart.”
― Laird Barron, Blood Standard

“You don’t need a mallet to take me apart. Let me stew in my own misery. Let me drown in what-ifs and maybes.”
― Laird Barron, Blood Standard

“The journey from birth to darkness has its share of plot twists, reversals, and triumphs. Nonetheless, one must never forget it’s into the dark that we’re hurtling. We all shake hands with King Pluto.”
― Laird Barron, Blood Standard

“Small-business taxes can be a bitch around here. Before you jump, call that number.” “I’m not feeling froggy.” That might’ve been a lie. What was I if I wasn’t in the life? A man possessed of my temperament doesn’t hang up his guns and pitch hay forever. He gets buried with bandoliers across his chest.”
― Laird Barron, Blood Standard

“There aren’t any coincidences, Mrs. Walker,” I said. “Only cycles and patterns.” “Buddhist?” “A superstitious cynic.”
― Laird Barron, Blood Standard

“Wild child,” Jade said. I’d figured as much. The 13 tattooed on her calf was a declaration of sovereignty or a cry for attention. It required twelve jurors and one judge to send an original G to the pen. Everybody knows that, though; real criminals and aspiring delinquents alike. She’d forgotten the ½, which meant “half a chance.” It didn’t mean anything except I should keep one eye open and my hand on my wallet.”
― Laird Barron, Blood Standard

“Next I met Lionel Robard, the farm’s other full-time employee. He proved an acerbic towheaded man a few years younger than myself. Lean and weathered and handsome like a guy who should’ve made it onto the silver screen but never did. Definitely an ex-soldier. Something in the flick of his cold glance, how he appraised me without seeming to, hinted at Special Forces. He was pitching hay when we came across him.”
― Laird Barron, Blood Standard

“A station wagon pulled into the yard and a cadaverous man in a plaid jacket emerged. Virgil introduced him as Norman Coates, manager of the Hawk Mountain Farm.”
― Laird Barron, Blood Standard

“Ah, and do try to exercise prudence in the friends you choose to invite to the farm.” “She means ixnay on a parade of whores coming and going from your shack,” Virgil said. “I wish,” I said.”
― Laird Barron, Blood Standard

“The farm is saved, hurrah!” Jade said without enthusiasm. She looked me over, pursing her lips at my sallow complexion and gimpy leg. Her expression made me thankful I wasn’t an injured horse. They scowled at my shaggy hair and thickening beard; nor were they pleased by my leather jacket, slacks, and scuffed Doc Martens. Tinhorn, city slicker, ne’er-do-well, is what my Big & Tall duds said about me. How much did they know of my background? No telling what lies Mr. Apollo had fed them, no telling what manner of bargain he’d struck.”
― Laird Barron, Blood Standard

“Brick-and-mortar shops with cracked façades, shuttered warehouses and rusting bridges, moribund churches, tall and sinister upon battle rises, abandoned colonial graveyards, derelict memorials, and overgrown estates of dead-as-dust patrician overseers, all unspooling.”
― Laird Barron, Blood Standard

“Kline ferried me north and east into what city folk consider the wilderness and I beheld a panoply of debauched, gothic America.”
― Laird Barron, Blood Standard

“I’m comfortable with old, old places, places hostile to evolved life. My longest and best home, Alaska, is such a one: a vast, wind-blasted vista of mountain and river and sea as ancient as the bedrock of the world itself. Large and largely empty. Inhuman, yet aware on some primal frequency. Palpably malevolent in its indifference, Alaska is a land where winter kills off wolves and caribou alike and breeds creeping, deadly cabin fever that does in scores of men and women every year.”
― Laird Barron, Blood Standard

“Mr. Apollo removed his hat and set it in his lap. Bald as a turkey vulture, pale blue eyes, a trim silver beard; a Confederate general in his dotage.”
― Laird Barron, Blood Standard

“Tonight, I was a prisoner: drugged, stripped, tortured, and well on the way to becoming a corpse. I intended to face my approaching doom with a smidgen of equanimity. Fortune and ruin, life and death, all the important things, are balanced upon the razor’s edge.”
― Laird Barron, Blood Standard

“An indefatigable brute—his umpteenth punch struck with the same bone-crushing force as the first had.”
― Laird Barron, Blood Standard

“Mid-winter and meat locker chilly,”
― Laird Barron, Blood Standard

“I took a measure of morbid pride in their professionalism and their fear. Tony Flowers and a couple of goons stripped me to my boxers. They chained me in the center of a ten-by-twenty concrete subbasement cell. I’m a big man, so the fellows used a lot of chain. The chair was solid wrought iron and looked as if it had been unbolted from the deck of a trawler. Dirty fluorescent bulbs pulsed overhead. The chamber reeked of bleach and mildew.”
― Laird Barron, Blood Standard

“IMAGES FROM THAT AFTERNOON will score my memory until death sweeps the slate bare:”
― Laird Barron, Blood Standard