Last Exit Quotes

“She always said, "We do what we can."
When they were on the road together, he thought that meant even small things are worth doing. Later, he realized what he first thought was a comforting slogan was actually a challenge: what CAN you do, really? Look at the world and ask yourself what it needs. Then look at yourself and ask what can I give, what sacrifices can I make, whom can I help?
There's always a tank rolling down some street. You can't do everthing. But that doesn't forgive you for not doing what you can.”
― Max Gladstone, Last Exit

“Even after two years on the road, most of her experience of conspiracies still came from stories about them--and stories were meant to communicate what was happening to an audience, while a real conspiracy depended on everybody save its actors living like goats in a farmyard, ignorant of knives until they fell.”
― Max Gladstone, Last Exit

“They'd set out on this quest without a wizard to guide them, finding the rules as they went. To do that, you read, you listened to jazz records or to the blues, you argued about hip-hop lyrics, you danced and you watched the dancers and you listened to poets and storytellers where poems were still read and stories still told. Sometimes you caught a glimpse, you caught a hint that others knew what you knew, that they had dreamed the path you now walked, or walked it themselves for a while.”
― Max Gladstone, Last Exit

“You dug irrigation ditches in your soul to channel your fear, to guide it to useful work. But the ditches remained even when the fear was gone--and some part of you kept shoring up those ditches and maintaining the waterworks in case and until the fear came back. Because the fear had to come back.”
― Max Gladstone, Last Exit

“Surviving these things didn't make them okay. It just let you know that you could survive them.”
― Max Gladstone, Last Exit

“You pushed on that gap between the way the world was and the way the world could be, until, if you were strong and smart and pure and very lucky and very dumb, one day the gap grew teeth and opened its mouth and ate you.”
― Max Gladstone, Last Exit

“Zelda had a sudden impression that the palace was alive, an inhuman giant buried to its neck in the city, waiting for her with many blank eyes. Those emerald columns were its teeth. It waited for each new wave of lords and ate them each in turn, sucked their brains through small holes drilled in their skulls....What did the palace care for whose flag it flew, whose head sat on the shoulders of the statue on it's throne? It was patient, and hungry. It laughed in architecture.”
― Max Gladstone, Last Exit

“What if you could peel a pearl? Take a fine knife and a magnifying glass and strip the layers of glint and glimmer year by year, until at last you reached the bit of wrong that had birthed the shine. But you’d have no pearl left.”
― Max Gladstone, Last Exit

“She did feel everything she’d said. The despair. Who wouldn’t, if they were paying attention? But you didn’t feel it all the time. You walled it up with purpose. With friendship. With vows and work. And you reminded yourself that it was not just you who felt this way, that there were others out there with their own pits and walls and vows and love and work, and you tried to let that make you kind.”
― Max Gladstone, Last Exit

“She didn’t like Indiana, so she pushed on through into Wisconsin, and when she was too tired to drive, she pulled into a gravel lot shaded by trees in Devil’s Lake State Park, south of Baraboo. Whose word was Baraboo? Maybe it came from Barabbas, but why would you name a town after that guy? Strange settlers, slapping names on things because they sounded cool, or because they’d heard someone indigenous once say that word in the vicinity.”
― Max Gladstone, Last Exit

“She did feel everything she’d said. The despair. Who wouldn’t, if they were paying attention? But you didn’t feel it all the time. You walled it up with purpose. With friendship. With vows and work. And you reminded yourself that it was not just you who felt this way, that there were others out there with their own pits and walls and vows and love and work, and you tried to let that make you kind. It wasn’t right. It wasn’t good. But she didn’t know another way. He said, “I’m sorry,” before she could. It felt as wrong to hear as it would have felt to say. They weren’t sorry. It was just hard. “Firewood.” “Yes,” she echoed. “Firewood.”
― Max Gladstone, Last Exit

“Zelda’s eyes were so wide and so trusting. No trace of doubt that Sarah would fix this, because Sarah was her friend, and friends were omnipotent. Sarah would make everything okay.”
― Max Gladstone, Last Exit

“It had seemed like a young river back when she was a dumb kid.”
― Max Gladstone, Last Exit

“shame was a door to hate.”
― Max Gladstone, Last Exit

“I’m scared all the time. Sometimes I think it must have been this way forever, everyone scared all the time, and maybe we grew up in one of the few moments in history when a few people weren’t.”
― Max Gladstone, Last Exit

“The Bronx had been a pleasant place to walk before Robert Moses got his hands on it. To hear Sal tell the story, Moses had been the king of New York roads, a child of wealth who burrowed into government and, once he chewed through its outer shell, established himself in its rib cage, a sort of parasitic pontifex for a new Rome.”
― Max Gladstone, Last Exit

“you are thirstier than the French Foreign Legion,”
― Max Gladstone, Last Exit

“Nobody ever needed a supernatural motive to be a dick.”
― Max Gladstone, Last Exit

“Wounds healed, but scars remained.”
― Max Gladstone, Last Exit

“Monsters never died, they only slept a while.”
― Max Gladstone, Last Exit