Patrick deWitt

“Your skin is prickly from fatigue and pain and there is a hissing in your ears. Time passes and the pills are taking hold like a glowing white planet coming into view. A reverse eclipse. And you watch with your eyes closed. The white planet is half exposed, it grips your heart in its light and seems to be pulling you forward and now you feel that you are falling. You are awake but dreaming. "The earth is not beautiful but the universe is," you say.”

“You are afraid of hell. But that’s all religion is, really. Fear of a place we’d rather not be, and where there’s no such a thing as suicide to steal us away.”

“The effects of her words stung me, and after she stole away I stood a long while before her looking glass, studying my profile, the line I cut in this world of men and ladies.”

“It is true, I thought. I am living a life.”

“He only wished to fight and cultivate an anger toward me, thus alleviating his guilt, but I would not abet him in this.”

“The creak of bed springs suffering under the weight of a restless man is as lonely a sound as I know.”

“Our blood is the same, we just use it differently.”

“All you will get from me is death.”

“when I see you, I feel the same. It is when I am away that I lose myself.”

“It is hard to find a friend,' I said. 'It is the hardest thing in this world,' he agreed.”

“The trapper nodded and returned his pistol to its holster. 'He can count to one hundred if it suits you,' he said, opening and closing his hand to stretch it. Charlie made a sour face. ‘What a stupid thing to say. Think of something else besides that. A man wants his last words to be respectable.’‘I will be speaking all though this day and into the night. I will tell my grandchildren of the time I killed the famous Sisters brothers.’‘That at least makes some sense. Also it will serve as a humorous footnote.”

“He makes good time for a hysterical man on foot.”

“Just your everyday grouping of civilized gentlemen, sitting in a round robin to discuss the events of the day with quivering erections.”

“Returning his pen to its holder, he told us, 'I will have him gutted with that scythe. I will hang him by his own intestines.' At this piece of dramatic exposition, I could not hep but roll my eyes. A length of intestines would not carry the weight of a child, much less a full grown man.”

“Do you know how much a hundred dollars is?' he asked. I said that I did not and he answered, 'It is a hundred dollars.”

“Here is another miserable mental image I will have to catalog and make room for.”

“I will never be a leader of men, and neither do I want to be one, and neither do I want to be led. I thought: I want to lead only myself.”

“He stood there weeping and watching us go, while behind him Lucky Paul entered and collapsed the prospector's tent, and I thought, Here is another miserable mental image I will have to catalog and make room for.”

“i don't suppose I have a choice.''As with so many things in a life, brother, I don't suppose you do.”

“I hope he dies out there," you say, and you laugh-sputter at the statement because it is a terrible thing to have said aloud and you hope you can play it off as a joke but Simon is staring hard at you, and now he knows for a fact something he has suspected for years, which is that you have a streak of hate in your heart and that it is deep and wide and though you have hidden it, it is unmistakably uncovered now, and he will never feel that previously mentioned fondness for you again [...]”

“Looking into each other's eyes and speaking together in low tones, it becomes apparent that she hopes you will walk her through her troubles and show her that male-female relations can be lovely even in loveless union. She is looking for lust fulfilled but she searches also for respect, and in this she is out of luck because you do not know her or like her very much and you do not respect yourself and so the most you can offer this girl is time out of her life and an unsatisfactory meeting of bodies and, if the fates are generous, a couple of laughs and good feelings. At any rate there will unquestionably be a divot in your hearts before dawn and Peg seems to pick up on this after thirty minutes of groping and pawing (the car interior is damp with dew) she breaks away and with great exasperation says, "What do you think you're doing?" You are smiling, because it is an utterly stupid and boring question, and you say to her, "I am sitting in an American car, trying to make out in America," a piece of poetry that arouses something in her, and you both climb into the back seat for a meeting even less satisfactory than you feared it might be. Now she is crying and you are shivering and it is time to go home and if you had a watch you would snap your wrist to look meaningfully at it but she dabs at her face and says she wants you to come upstairs and share a special-occasion bottle of very old and expensive wine and as there is no way not to do this you follow her through the dusty lobby and into the lurching, diamond-gated elevator and into her cluttered apartment to scrutinize her furnishings and unread or improperly read paperbacks, and you wonder if there is anything more depressing than the habitats of young people, young and rudderless women in particular.”

“Come with me into the world and reclaim your independence. You stand to gain so much, and riches are the least of it.”

“Here lies Morris, a good man and friend. He enjoyed the finer points of civilized life but never shied away from a hearty adventure or hard work. He died a free man, which is more than most people can say, if we are going to be honest about it. Most people are chained to their own fear and stupidity and haven't the sense to level a cold eye at just what is wrong with their lives. Most people will continue on, dissatisfied but never attempting to understand why, or how they might change things for the better, and they die with nothing in their hearts but dirt and old, thin blood - weak blood, diluted - and their memories aren't worth a goddamned thing, you will see what I mean.”

“Most people are chained to their own fear and stupidity and haven’t the sense to level a cold eye at just what is wrong with their lives. Most people will continue on, dissatisfied but never attempting to understand why, or how they might change things for the better, and they die with nothing in their hearts but dirt and old, thin blood - weak blood, diluted - and their memories aren’t worth a goddamned thing.”

“Where is your mother, Charlie asked.Dead.I’m sorry to hear thatThank you. But she was always dead.”

“I do not know what it was about that boy but just looking at him, even I wanted to clout him on the head. It was a head that invited violence.”

“We can all of us be hurt, and no one is exclusively safe from worry and sadness.”

“This perhaps was what lay at the root of the hysteria surrounding what came to be known as the Gold Rush: Men desiring a feeling of fortune; the unlucky masses hoping to skin or borrow the luck of others, or the luck of a destination. A seductive notion, and one I thought to be wary of. To me, luck was something you either earned or invented through strength of character. You had to come by it honestly; you could not trick or bluff your way into it.”

“I thought, When a man is properly drunk it is as though he is an a room by himself--there is a physical, impenetrable separation between him and his fellows.”

“...things I had come to find humor in would make your honest man swoon.”

“...I am happy to welcome you to a town peopled in morons exclusively. Furthermore, I hope that your transformation to moron is not an unpleasant experience.”

“He is not bad, I don't think. Perhaps he is simply too lazy to be good.”

“I sighed. ‘It doesn’t matter what we do. Money comes and goes.’ I shook my head. ‘It doesn’t matter and you know it doesn’t.”

“Mayfield said, "You asked what I was thinking. Well, I will tell you. I was thinking that a man like myself, after suffering such a blow as you men have struck on this day, has two distinct paths he might travel in his life. He might walk out into the world with a wounded heart, intent on sharing his mad hatred with every person he passes; or, he might start out anew with an empty heart, and he should take care to fill it up with only proud things from then on, so as to nourish his desolate mind-set and cultivate something positive or new.”

“That is to say, nine dead beavers in a line on the sand. There was something decorative about this, but also ominous or forbidding.”

“I almost vomited in the boot! I was just about to vomit in the boot! Can you imagine how upset I would have been?”

“I was often forced to whip him, which some men do not mind doing and which in fact some enjoy doing, but which I did not like to do; and afterward he, Tub, believes me cruel and thought to himself, Sad life, sad life.”

“When you sleep, your dreams are those of a dullard”

“I will admit he is unusual, but that is perhaps the closest I could come to complimenting him.”

“Work will drive you crazy if you let it.”

“I lay in the dark thinking about the difficulties of family, how crazy and crooked the stories of a bloodline can be.”

“This moment, this one position in time, was the happiest I will ever be as long as I am living. I have since felt it was too happy, that men are not meant to have access to this kind of satisfaction; certainly it has tempered every moment of happiness I have experienced since.”

“We rode along in silence, thinking our private thoughts. Charlie and I had an unspoken agreement not to throw ourselves into speedy travel just after a meal. There were many hardships to our type of life and we took these small comforts as they came; I found they added up to something decent enough to carry on”

“...but I could not sleep without proper covering and spent the rest of the night rewriting lost arguments from my past, altering history so that I emerged victorious.”

“Your laughter is like cool water to me," I said. I felt my heart sob at these strange words, and it would not have been hard to summon tears: Strange. " "You are so serious all of a sudden," she told me. "I am not any one thing," I said. (137)”

“I saw my bulky person in the windows of the passing storefronts and wondered, when will that man there find himself to be loved?”

“One night, after hours, you are alone and running your hands under the hot water when the voice asks if you aren't through with your ablutions yet. You do not know the word but write it down to look it up the next day. You learn its definition on page 3 of Merriam-Webster's Collegiate Dictionary: "The washing of one's body or part of it (as in a religious rite)." You are certain you have never heard this word before as you were raised without any religion and have never set foot inside any church or temple, and you return the dictionary to the shelf and vow never to play this game of counting your wounds again.”