Jeff Lindsay

“And as we should all know by now, anytime you predict failure you have an excellent chance of being right.”

“Have you ever noticed that every now and then you'll overhear an amazingly clear declarative sentence when you're out in public, spoken with such force and purpose that you absolutely yearn to know what it means, because it is just so forceful and crystalline? And you want to follow along behind whoever just spoke, even though you don;t know them, just to find out what that sentence means and how it would affect the lives of the people involved?”

“Miami drivers have long ago take the simple chore of going from one place to another and turned it into a kind of high-speed, heavily armed game of high-stakes bumper cars.”

“Why bother inflicting enormous pain on yourself when sooner or later Life would certainly get around to doing it for you?”

“A reasonable being might think that he and I could find some common ground; have a cup of coffee and compare our Passengers, exchange trade talk and chitchat about dismemberment techniques. But no: Doakes wanted me dead. And I found it difficult to share his point of view.”

“The mission sat in a converted store front on the corner of a medium-busy street. There was a small crowd gathered in front - no real surprise, since they gave out food and clothing, all all you had to do was spend a few moments of your life listening to the good reverend explain why you were going to Hell. It seemed like a pretty good bargain, even to me, but I wasn't hungry.”

“It was clear to me that it wouldn't matter what I did - they would never truly appreciate me or learn what I had to offer. They were far beyond fickle - they were insensible, like kittens,predatory little things, distracted by the first bit of string or shiny bauble that rolled across the floor, and nothing I could ever say or do could possibly make any kind of dent in their willful ignorance.”

“Dex,” she said. “Are you all right?”“I’ll be fine, Sis,” I said, feeling somewhat light-headed, “if you’ll just turn off that horrible music.”

“But of course, there's no rest for the wicked, which I certainly am; as I said, no rest for the wicked.”

“You can use my phone, if you’ll pay the roaming charges,” I said.“I need a land line,” he said “A pay phone.”“You’re out of touch with the times,” I said. “A pay phone might be a little hard to find. Nobody uses them anymore.”

“Perhaps Dexter’s dutiful but uninspired brain pictured him as Sherlock Holmes, able to examine the wheel ruts and deduce that a left-handed hunchback with red hair and a limp had gone down the road carrying a Cuban cigar and a ukulele. I would find no clues, not that it mattered.”

“Quickly, Watson, the game’s afoot,” I said, but Deborah was not in a literary mood.”

“But of course, very few people are Dexter. This is generally a good thing, but in this case it came in handy to be me. Four months after reading a story in the paper about a missing boy, I read a similar story. The boys were around the same age; details like that always ring a small bell and send a Mister Rogers whisper trickling through my brain: “Hello, neighbor.”

“Everyone is so cheerful and happy,” I said“This isn’t Mister Rogers Neighborhood, Dex. It’s Miami. Only the bad guys are happy.” She looked at me without expression, a perfect cop stare. “How come you’re not laughing and singing?”“Unkind, Deb. Very unkind. I’ve been good for months.”She took a sip of water. “Uh-huh. And it’s making you crazy.”

“And if so, I could fill my time with the new entry on my rather exclusive social register, whoever had created the Howling Vegetable of N.W. 4th Street, and the fact that this sounded rather like a Sherlock Holmes title made it no less urgent.”

“And so Deb is the only person in the world who gives a rusty possum fart whether I live or die.”

“How bad could things be if my hair was neat?”

“I watched him as he lay there, taking the needle without flinching and knowing that even the relief it brought was temporary, that his end was coming and he could not stop it—and knowing, too, that he was not afraid, and that he would do this the right way, as he had done everything else in his life the right way. And I knew this, too: Harry understood me. No one else ever had, and no one else ever would, through all time in all the world. Only Harry. The only reason I ever thought about being human was to be more like him.”

“It was indeed a long wait, well over two hours. I sat in the car and listened to the radio and tried to picture, bite by bite, what it was like to eat a medianochesandwich: the crackle of the bread crust, socrisp and toasty it scratches the inside of your mouth as you bite down. Then the first taste of mustard, followed by the soothing cheese and the salt of the meat. Next bite—a piece of pickle. Chew it all up; let the flavors mingle. Swallow. Take a big sip of Iron Beer (pronounced Ee-roan Bay-er, and it’s a soda). Sigh. Sheer bliss. I would rather eat than do anything else except play with the Passenger. It’s a true miracle of genetics that I am not fat.”

“It’s like, everything really is two ways, the way we all pretend it is and the way it really is”

“The more I heard it in my thoughts, themore sense it made. And beyond sense, it became a kind of seductive mantra.”

“I waved to everybody. Some of themeven waved back. They knew me, had seen me go by before, always cheerful, a big hello for everybody. He was such a nice man. Very friendly. I can’t believe he did those horrible things . . .”

“She looked up and ran her eyes over me,slowly, while I stood and wondered why. Had she forgotten what I looked like? But she finished with a big smile. She really did like me, the idiot.”

“Dexter the Magnificent, who doth bestride the world like a Colossus, many lovely corpses at his feet, brought to you in live color just in time for the evening news. Oh, Mama, who is that large and handsome man with the bloody saw? Why, that's Dexter Morgan, dear, the horrible man they arrested a little while ago. But Mama, why is he smiling? He likes his work, dear. Let that be a lesson to you--always find a worthy job that keeps you happy.”

“Vince and I had reached the point where there was nothing else we could think of to do with the taco wrapper, and since he refused to draw straws for the privilege of telling Deborah, I'd been forced to make the call to give her the news that we'd come up blank. And three minutes later, here she was, striding into our lab like avenging fury."Goddamn it," she said before she was even all the way in the room, "I need something from you!""Maybe a sedative?" Vince suggested, and for once I thought he was right on the money.”

“... Dexter the sofa spud ...”

“And as always seems to happen when I have reached the point where I am ready to take decisive action, everything began to happen at once.”

“Anytime somebody is absolutely certain about something, they are almost always absolutely wrong”

“Perhaps because I'll never be one, humans are interesting to me.”

“I don't know if you have noticed this, but it is quite possible for two human beings to have a conversation in which one or both parties involved has absolutely no idea what they're talking about.”

“...my conscience has the same hard reality as a unicorn.”

“It took me a moment. I blinked, and suddenly it swam into focus and I had to frown very hard to keep myself from giggling out loud like the schoolgirl Deb had accused me of being. Because he had arranged the arms and legs in letters, and the letters spelled out a single small word: BOO. The three torsos were carefully arranged below the BOO in a quarter-circle, making a cute little Halloween smile. What a scamp.”

“Anybody can be charming if they don't mind faking it, saying all the stupid, obvious, nauseating things that a conscience keeps most people from saying. Happily, I don't have a conscience. I say them.”

“...being torn apart by far too many loyalties that could not possibly live together in the same brain.”

“It's an odd term, girlfriend, particuarly for grown persons. And in practice an even odder concept. Generally speaking, in adults it described a woman, not a girl, who was willing to provide sex, not friendship. In fact, from what I had observed it was quite possible for one to actively dislike one's girlfriend, although of course true hatred is reserved for marriage.”

“Have you noticed how difficult it is just to get along in the world? If you're no good at all in your job, people treat you badly and eventually you will be unemployed. And if you're a little better than competent, everyone expects miracles from you, every single time. Like most of life, it's a no-win situation. And if you dare to mention it, no matter how creatively you phrase your complaints, you are shunned as a whiner.”

“And once again I found myself wondering, as I drifted off to stunned and unbelieving sleep:How do these terrible things always happen to me?”

“Of course, having information to use is one thing. Knowing what it means and how to use it is a differentstory.”

“...the only light in this tiny-mooned night comes from the windows of the apartment building, a matching purple halo from each window, a dozen televisions all tuned to the pointless, empty, idiotic unreality o the same reality show, everyone watching in vacuous lockstep as true reality cruises slowly past outside licking its chops”

“I sighed; as comforting as it may be to some of us, sarcasm, like youth, is wasted on the young.”

“Happily for me, ninety-nine percent of all human life is spent simply repeating the same old actions, speaking the same tired clichés, moving like a zombie through the same steps of the dance we plodded through yesterday and the day before and the day before. It seems horribly dull and pointless-but it really makes a great deal of sense. After all, if you only have to follow the same path every day, you don't need to think at all. Considering how good humans are at any mental process more complicated than chewing, isn't that the best for everybody?”

“That's why I liked him, I think. Another guy pretending to be human, just like me.”

“Was insanity really easier to accept than unconsciousness?”

“First things first has always been my motto, mostly because it makes absolutely no sense - after all, if first things were second or third, they wouldn't be first things, would they? Still, cliches exist to comfort the feeble minded, not to provide any actual meaning.”

“Dying makes everyone weaker, subject to painful insight, and not always insight into any kind of special truth - it's just the approaching end that makes people want to believe they are seeing something in the line of a great revelation.”

“the faster it ran away from me. And I found myself reasoning that perhaps one more beer would unlock the doors of perception,”

“What do you want a clock for?” “To find out what time it is,” I said. “I think that’s the usual purpose.”

“you can’t use logic on human behavior.”

“I often find myself in situations where it seems to me like everyone else has read the instruction book”

“It revealed a cruelty that really made one wonder if the universe was such a good idea after all.”