Smoke City Quotes

“Marvin, you're here now," Vale said. He stood up, his knees popping. "The food sucks. They have severed animal heads in the bar. I don't know if you know that." His cigarette sparked against the gravel and he ratcheted open my walker in front of me. "But you're among friends, okay, and you're still walking upright and taking solids. You're winning. Anything beyond that is thinking too far ahead”
― Keith Rosson, Smoke City

“Our lives are filled with these brief intersections, these unknowable trajectories that never travel in straight lines.”
― Keith Rosson, Smoke City

“Everyone was connected — I saw it, felt the expansiveness of it, but also understood that such knowledge needed to be parsed into a necessary blindness: to comprehend the magnitude of it would be too much. As much as I had lived, in all my years, I had seen but a corner of the tapestry. A thread.”
― Keith Rosson, Smoke City

“The greatest fallacy: looking continually for an answer in things that are unanswerable.”
― Keith Rosson, Smoke City

“How do you pinpoint the beginnings of a cyclone, or measure the fallout of a man's failings?”
― Keith Rosson, Smoke City

“The Curse works like this: Memory arrives in lockstep with sentience, with self-awareness. It arrives all at once, boom. A detonation. I'm a newborn handed this sudden bomb-blast of identity, this explosive memory of all previous lives lived all at once. Even as synapses struggle to form, neurons connecting with muscle cells.”
― Keith Rosson, Smoke City

“My death, when it arrived, came from my horse. Of all things! Laughable. This was something I was to learn about death — how many ways besides war there are in which to die, the majority of them graceless and terrible, and so many of them full of a kind of dark mirth.”
― Keith Rosson, Smoke City

“An odd byproduct of the Curse: muscle memory lived a surprising half-life. I'd sometimes find myself the recipient of blips and bursts of centuries-old information. Brushing my teeth above the record store, I'd suddenly remember the protocol for dissecting a cadaver in the seventeenth century or, I don't know, how to operate a steam-powered printing press. I had a rudimentary, working remembrance of eight or ten languages.”
― Keith Rosson, Smoke City

“The very night that the trajectory of my life had been set — I was an executioner's son, and so would be an executioner — was also the night my world became unmoored.”
― Keith Rosson, Smoke City

“Death was like that, casual with its cruelty.”
― Keith Rosson, Smoke City