She was night without the promise of dawn, darkness without light.
That is what we do for the ones we love: we lie to protect them. Not all truths are welcome.
I have found in the past that what passes for coincidence is usually life’s way of telling you that you’re not paying enough attention.
We haunt ourselves, I sometimes think; or, rather, we choose to be haunted. If there is a hole in our lives, then something will fill it. We invite it inside, and it accepts willingly.
The beam caught the bowed head of Angel. He glanced up into Bobby Sciorra’s eyes and smiled. Sciorra looked puzzled for a moment and then his mouth opened in slow-dawning realization. He was already turning to try to locate Louis when the darkness seemed to come alive around him and his eyes widened as he realized, too late, that death had come for him too.
He understood the half-life of hope: it is not despair that destroys us, but its opposite. Hope is the winding, despair the unwinding. Despair brings with it the possibility of an ending. Taken to the extreme, its logical conclusion is death. But hope sustains. It can be exploited. Ormsby.
His grandfather used to say that there were angels whom devils would greet on the street. If that were true, thought Parker, then let the devils raise their hats to him. It would just make them easier to identify and destroy.
Perhaps it’s true that all men love their fathers, no matter how terrible the things they do to their sons: there is a part of us that remains forever in debt to those responsible for our existence.
The stories were always looking for a way to be told, to be brought to life through books and reading. That was how they crossed over from their world into ours.
There are people whose eyes you must avoid, whose attention you must not draw to yourself. They are strange, parasitic creatures, lost souls seeking to stretch across the abyss and make fatal contact with the warm, constant flow of humanity. They live in pain and exist only to visit that pain on others.
They listen, the dead. They’re always listening. What else is there for them to do?
Regret, he now knew, was a useless emotion, the poor cousin of guilt.
In any given situation, the most difficult step is to reach a decision. Once a decision is made, control can be asserted.
It didn’t matter whether a thing existed or not. What mattered was the trouble caused by those who believed in its existence.
A job, in their view, was a job, and, as with most jobs, you just had to find that perfect balance between doing as little as possible so you didn’t get tired, and just enough so that you didn’t get fired.
Law and justice are not the same.
I learned something that day: there may be worse things than arriving somewhere with your dog and leaving without him, but there aren’t many.
He was just thinking aloud, ruling out possibilities by releasing them into the air, like canaries in the coal mine of his mind.
When I started in homicide, the Dead Sea was just sick.
He has all the weaknesses that come with a conscience, but none of the strengths.