Riding the Devil Quotes

“They were all walking the prescribed path from birth to death in bewildered obedience, guided by their omnipresent screens, living out their moments by accident, never quite knowing why, until it was too late and it was all over. ​And then, I told myself as I watched them flow past, painted amber by the streetlamps and the shop fronts, as they are lowered into the ground, all their yesterdays having done nothing but light a dusty path to death, those they leave behind will say, with empty, borrowed wisdom, “He had a good life.”
― Blake Banner, Riding the Devil

“Kings and priests invented gods, and the rights they grant to protect their property. They don’t exist in nature.”
― Blake Banner, Riding the Devil

“The right?” Now she turned to look at me, uncertain what I meant. ​“There is no such thing,” I said. “It doesn’t signify. Nobody had the right to kill Sonia Cooper or her father. Nobody gave me the right to kill her killer. When a mountain lion kills a white-tail, or a bear snatches a salmon from the river, nobody gave them the right. The universe is cruel, Maria, and dispassionate. There are no rights. You need something, or you want something, you take it, and you take the consequences with it.”
― Blake Banner, Riding the Devil

“So what you doin’ these days? Anything legal?” ​“Nothing I could tell you about without shooting you afterwards.”
― Blake Banner, Riding the Devil

“A plan was assembling itself in my mind as though of its own volition. I could see the different parts as physical things: a jigsaw of living scenes acting themselves out in my mind.”
― Blake Banner, Riding the Devil

“There was a guy with a thing on his lip that really wanted to be a moustache but lacked the courage to assert itself.”
― Blake Banner, Riding the Devil

“She had the kind of face you get after you realize you’ve failed to pursue one single dream in your life, and now it’s pretty much over.”
― Blake Banner, Riding the Devil

“There is no meaning in nature, Claire. There is no right or wrong about a bear killing and eating a salmon. A mountain lion catches a lamb and kills it and eats it. There is no reason or meaning. It’s just the way it works. Meaning is something we humans overlay on things.” I smiled. “If we were rabbits, we’d be eating because we were hungry. You would eat this lettuce leaf here, and this tomato, and I would be a horrible, mutant carnivorous wabbit, eating the steak, and then possibly you. But we would be eating to survive, because that’s how it works.” I shrugged. “But we are humans, not wabbits, so we are sitting here eating while we try to give things deep, complicated meanings.”
― Blake Banner, Riding the Devil

“They were all walking the prescribed path from birth to death in bewildered obedience, guided by their omnipresent screens, living out their moments by accident, never quite knowing why, until it was too late and it was all over.”
― Blake Banner, Riding the Devil

“my daughter’s killer to face justice, to”
― Harry Bauer, Riding the Devil