Michael Reilly

“In New Orleans, absurdity is like the humidity. It permeates everything, until you stop noticing it. It connects everything and everyone in its oddness and the climate of convention has no place within it. That’s how it goes there. You live, breath, and feel the life that finds you. Thinking’s not required. Thinking can come later, when the weather breaks and you need some saner shelter.”

“In the final reckoning, there’s only two types of scumbag: the dumb ones locked behind the prison gate and the smart ones with their name above it.”

“I’m minded what my grandmother used to say. The cruelest punishment of Hell is that you get to look up and see Heaven.”

“You can get over a broken heart or settle the score and move on. Guilt though, you let that bitch in, you’re wedded for life.”

“As Harold slipped the ring he’d picked special in Hong Kong onto Marie’s finger, I doubt either of them could scarce say anything; for the heart speaks but seven words and only Heaven hears them.”

“If you take the cemeteries tour, remember that the bigger the crypt, the bigger the bastard. You need an extra leg-up to Heaven when the Devil has you by the ankle.”

“You were made for me, built for no other purpose than to make me love you.”

“Julianna: We are only what others strive to see.”

“Bah! You are so not the romantic you led me to believe. For that, I’m going to plague you from the next life. Every time it rains, that’ll be me, trying to knock some spirituality into that thick head of yours.”

“I didn’t know then what a crush was or what makes one so perilously alluring. It is our biology reminding us that emotion is postscript, not preface, to our baser desires.”

“A secret is a rotting anchor, hidden in deep water. You drop it and convince yourself that it’s safe, tethered beyond sight. In that peculiar comfort, you forget that it binds you. And when a storm rolls in, it will not raise.”

“Welcome to the real world, Scott. The sweet things in life don’t seem so sweet when you have to roll up your sleeves and fix the greasy machines that make them, do they?”

“It’s funny but true: you can much more easily bottle up an emotion when it’s hi-grade nuclear. You give awaythe little things, but with some small ingenuity, you can conceal some really fucked-up shit, especially in plainsight. If you can’t extract the elephant from the room, paint the walls grey. Just be mindful not to step oneither end of it after.”

“If you let it, the shit that actually went down could put years on you but it wasn't fatal. The gut you busted to keep all the other potential shit from ever happening would always kill you though, with slow certainty. ‘Death from a thousand Coulds’, Stencek called it.”

“Dig all you want. I have nothing for you. But dig all you want. I want you to.”

“Well, I think we all started off as ash, astral ash; the Big Bang and all that. You and I - stardust. Maybe a little piece of me and a little piece of you were once companions on some great cosmic dust making its way to this rock.”

“Good is a-dime-a-dozen. I mean perfect, quintessentially unique, unforgettable; a moment you would gladly stay in for the rest of your life, only the essence of it to sustain you.”

“Why does he feel the need to write one woman off because he has the superficial need for another's unique trait? We are the ultimate Russian Dolls. Keep twisting us open and - voila! Another. Then another. Some men just don't have the patience, or the skill, to discover what they're missing.”