“That means that the universe is two-dimensional. Matter, energy, time, you, me and the floor are holograms.”

“Our guy has a property office, John. And I don't mean the Property Office here in One PP. I mean the huge fucking storage facility. A guy in there, with access to thousands of fucking handguns. Even the ones that other people would be keeping an eye on, like Son of Sam's piece, for fuck's sake - a guy in there who'll just boost them and give them to our guy to kill people with. And if the guns are too famous, he'll cut his own slugs out of the bodies and walk away. This guy, our guy, he's actually starting to scare me a bit right now.""A couple of hundred kills to his name didn't do that?""Meh. I dream about killing two hundred people every fucking night.""You know," said Tallow, "whenever I'm in danger of forgetting you're CSU, you always find a way to remind me.”

“ You're probably wondering why there's never any good news. I mean, I've been doing this job a few months now. I've been soaking up the paper every week, same as you, and watching the same newsfeeds as you. I got the same list burned into the front of my head as you. Death. Horror. Bad sex. Living nightmares. Each day a little further down the spiral. There's never any good news because they know you. I mean, here's the top of today's column that I discarded: I had a really good time last night down the bar with my assistant and some cheerfully doomed sex fiends of our acquaintance. No one ever sold newspapers by telling you the truth; life just ain't that bad.”

“I remember first learning about death quite vividly.I'm not sure how old I was, but I remember the conversation like it was yesterday. My grandfather had died, and my mother was trying to explain it to me.'Sometimes, when someone gets ill, and they're very very old, they don't get better again. They just get iller and iller and then... then their body stops working.''I don't understand.''What's in them just goes away, and doesn't come back.''Grandpa isn't coming back?''No,' she said. 'Not ever again.''Grandpa said he was going away and not ever coming back after he held Grandma's head in that cotton-dump outside of town and kicked Skeeter seventy-three times.''Grandpa was very drunk. That's not the same as being dead. Grandpa's dead, son. He's not there anymore.'And I remember saying, 'Hold everything right fucking THERE.'You went to all the trouble of conceiving me, and giving birth to me, and raising me and feeding me and clothing me and all-- and, YEAH, whipping me from time to time, and making me live in a house that's freezing fucking cold all the goddamn time-- and you make me cry and things hurt so much and disappointments crush my heart every day and I can't do half the things I want to do and sometimes I just want to scream-- and what I've got to look forward to is my body breaking and something flipping off the switch in my head-- I go through all this-- and then there's death?'What is the motherfucking deal here?”

“I'm sorry. Is that too harsh an observation for you? Does that sound too much like the Truth? Fuck you. If anyone in this shithole city gave two tugs of a dead dog's cock about Truth, this wouldn't be happening.”

“Where's the elevator?" Mike asked, sheathing his weapon. Tallow felt a little better telling Mike there wasn't an elevator and watching his face. But then Mike picked up the dolly, boxes and all, with one hand, took the kit bag from Sophie with the other, and started jogging up the stairs with"Third floor, right?""There," said Scarly, "goes a man who has names for all his muscles.""I was just thinking that," Tallow said. "Serious gym rat.""No, I mean he's named all his muscles. That's a man who calls one of his muscles Steve.”

“If anyone in this shithole city gave two tugs of a dead dog's cock about Truth, this wouldn't be happening.”