Paper Targets Quotes

“Clean clothes. Gentle talk. Someone to wake up with. Maybe relationships would work if they were based on present-tense actions that never looked for a future beyond the next day.”
― Steve S. Saroff, Paper Targets: Art Can Be Murder

“But someone who has been busted broke, if they can take care of themselves from that point, they act different. They build their own fires.”
― Steve S. Saroff, Paper Targets: Art Can Be Murder

“My sadness, and especially my joy, one moment was solid, but then the next it was empty space.”
― Steve S. Saroff, Paper Targets: Art Can Be Murder

“We have no choice other than to become veterans of time, but is it wrong to hold onto the sparks even if they still burn?”
― Steve S. Saroff, Paper Targets: Art Can Be Murder

“I was standing in front of Worden’s market. I looked across the street to Charlie’s bar. I was thinking about going in to see if there might be a mid-day drunk sitting on a barstool to talk with to help me feel like I was back on the honest side of life. Maybe one who would tell stories about working in the woods or highway crews. Someone I could swap some truths with. But perhaps what would have helped me the most would have been a drug dealer. Someone I could have secretly observed working his trade, watched how the exchange of palmed cash for little baggies of heroin transpired. Maybe that would have given me clues about how the more experienced criminals moved and breathed and managed to spend their non-sleeping hours without collapsing.”
― Steve S. Saroff, Paper Targets: Art Can Be Murder

“What is weak, emphasize as strong. Not sure how to pronounce a word? Then say it loudly with confidence. If technology is outdated, the company board of directors will spend fortunes advertising that their products are the newest and best. To finance the lies, the board will fire a third of the employees, making stock prices go up. Then, before customers disconnect and go to competitors, the company will have made enough money on its lies to buy a startup company with new technology. But, of course, the new technology should not be a backdoor for thieves.”
― Steve S. Saroff, Paper Targets: Art Can Be Murder

“Crazy is crazy, but lonely is lonely. I do not know which is the saddest.”
― Steve S. Saroff, Paper Targets: Art Can Be Murder

“Running away, then returning. My present was feeding on my past, and my future was waiting for the recursive loop to complete.”
― Steve S. Saroff, Paper Targets: Art Can Be Murder

“I used to study the night, the stars, while camping next to my car. I learned names from an old star chart that I carried along with my highway maps. Mintaka, in Orion’s Belt, the bright left eye of the Bull. Sirius. Vega. Trying for a direction beyond anywhere possible, I looked at distant points of bright light. I wished that I could find out where I was going by navigating by the light that had traveled forever.”
― Steve S. Saroff, Paper Targets: Art Can Be Murder

“I threw both my phones in, one after the other. The splashing sounds they made in the dark were like two trout rising for stoneflies. Trout that sleep in the eddies behind round river boulders. Trout that wake up at dawn and hide all day by pretending to be shadows.”
― Steve S. Saroff, Paper Targets: Art Can Be Murder

“Everywhere the Chinese worked building the railways, tamping black powder into spark holes, or digging for copper. Everywhere they died.”
― Steve S. Saroff, Paper Targets: Art Can Be Murder

“These bricks came from kilns that were in China. Then the cargo ships that brought the refugees over, ships meant to be filled with lumber or coal, those ships couldn't draft right with their soft, human loads. Even packed with people, the ships were not heavy enough, so the owners stacked bricks down there with them." He kicked at the exposed cobblestones and said, "Imagine the misery. Then they sold the bricks to the Anaconda, and you can still find these cobblestones on the back railway streets from Seattle to here. Everywhere the Chinese worked building the railways, t”
― Steve S. Saroff, Paper Targets: Art Can Be Murder

“I didn't have friends. What I had were people who needed what I could do for them. I had rocks and trees. I had fire and ravens. And I had patterns.”
― Steve S. Saroff, Paper Targets: Art Can Be Murder

“The railroad edge of Tokyo, where school children commute four hours a day between their cramped homes and distant schools while their parents work. Same sort of stuff as the rusting oil barrel fringe of Montana towns, the emptiness past the sprawl, but in Tokyo, it was a sanitized and crowded emptiness.”
― Steve S. Saroff, Paper Targets: Art Can Be Murder

“The city, in the brightening daylight, the city in front and underneath us, was waking up from dreams of stars and dreams of promise and was becoming a maze of lies.”
― Steve S. Saroff, Paper Targets: Art Can Be Murder