Some ghost of myself still lived back in the days when we’d shared a bed and talked of the future. But that love we’d had and those selves we’d been were gone, placed in a box like old photographs and letters you’d never read again.
It’s odd how fast a beautiful woman can turn a guy’s mind into lint storage. Just by being a beautiful woman.
Each day in this country, twenty-three hundred children are reported missing.
It took only a second for another to arrive on the same path as yours and change your life to a point it couldn’t change back. One second.
But as the years passed, he missed her more, not less, and his need for her became a cut that would not scar over, would not stop leaking.
Teddy wondered, and not for the first time, not by a long shot, if this was the day that missing her would finally be too much for him.
The harsh light above them caught her face, and Sean could see what she’d look like when she was much older – a handsome woman, scarred by wisdom she never asked for.
Joe closed his hand over the watch and it was still warm from his father’s pocket, ticking against his palm like a heart.
Men. If you give them half a chance, they’ll fuck you over just to prove they can.
Do you know the primary difference between men and gods? … Gods don’t think they can become men
We live in a world of disposable memory, nothing’s built to last, not even shame.
There are so many more important things to worry about than how you’re perceived by strangers.
I go on the presumption that everyone’s full of shit until proven otherwise, and this usually serves me in good stead.
Men who believe that the way to the mind is not by way of ice picks through the brain or large dosages of dangerous medicine but through an honest reckoning of the self.
When they’d first come out in the morning, a single flounder lay flapping and puffing in the breezeway, one sad, swollen eye looking back toward the sea.
She told him that he had the most beautiful voice she’d ever heard, that it sounded like whiskey and wood smoke.
It’s hard to close the door on optimistic expectations when you love someone.
Choice, I’ve always believed, is all that separates us from animals.
Maybe honor was in its twilight. Maybe it had always been heading that way. Or worse, maybe it had always been an illusion.
Angie was where most of me began and all of me ended.
All the stuff our fathers took for granted as long as you worked hard, the great safety net and the fair wage and the gold watch at the end of it all? That’s all gone around here, my friend.
How much violence, Marshal, do you think a man can carry before it breaks him?
What’s your name?””Emma Gould,” she said. “What’s yours?””Wanted.””By all the girls or just the law?
How many psychiatrists does it take to screw in a lightbulb?” “I don’t know. How many?” “Eight.” “Why?” “Oh, stop overanalyzing it.
I think if a man beats you and fucks half the women he sees and no one will help you, axing him isn’t the least understandable thing you can do.
Chuck said, “Hey. How many surrealists does it take to screw in a lightbulb?” Cawley looked over at him. “I’ll bite. How many?” “Fish,” Chuck said and let loose a bright bark of a laugh.
Maybe that’s what love is-counting the bandages until someone says, ‘Enough’.
That’s the thing about being a victim; you start to think it’ll happen to you on a regular basis. It’s living with the reality of your own vulnerability, and it sucks.
Danny could see it in their faces when they shook Steve’s hand—they’d have preferred him dead. Death allowed for the illusion of heroism. The maimed turned that illusion into an uncomfortable odor.
Patrick Kenzie asking a bemused waitress for a newspaper in smalltown USA. ‘It’s like a homepage without a scroll button?
He was broad-shouldered, dark-haired and dark-eyed; more than once, women had been noted openly regarding him, and not just immigrant women or those who smoked in public.
Vanity is a weakness. I know this. It’s a shallow dependence on the exterior self, on how one looks instead of what one is.
I won the parental lottery. Most of the kids I grew up with either came from really fractured homes, or really violent ones. I went home to a very traditional, good Irish Catholic family.