Tiff's Quote Blog

Columbus did what people had been doing for thousands of years. There's nothing special about coming to America.

He said nothing. It seemed the smartest thing to say.

I'm no longer young as I was, but I can tell you this, you never say no to the opportunity to piss, to eat, or to get half an hour's shut-eye. You follow me?

'This is the only country in the world,' said Wednesday into the stillness, 'that worries about what it is...The rest of them know what they are. No one ever needs to go searching for the heart of Norway. Or looks for the soul of Mozambique. They know what they are.'

'Liberty,' boomed Wednesday, as they walked to the car, 'is a bitch who must be bedded on a mattress of corpses.'

'Good and ill,' said the squinting stranger. 'We're like the wind. We blows both ways.'

He had such dangerous eyes.

The important thing to understand about American history, wrote Mr. Ibis, in his leather-bound journal, is that it is fictional, a charcoal-sketched simplicity for the children, or the easily bored.

Ideas are more difficult to kill than people, but they can be killed, in the end.

Shadow thought there was a lot to be said for bottling up emotions. If you did it long enough and deep enough, he suspected, pretty soon you wouldn't feel anything at all.

Every hour wounds. The last one kills.

'Too much talking these days. Talk talk talk. This country would get along much better if people learned how to suffer in silence.'

'For the joy of it,' said Sweeney, sober now, or at least, no longer visibly drunk. 'For the sheer unholy fucken delight of it. Can't you feel the joy in your own veins, rising like sap in the springtime?'

The grin got bigger. Shadow found himself remembering a PBS show about chimpanzees. The show claimed that when apes and chimps smile it's only to bare their teeth in a grimace of hate or aggression or terror. When a chimp grins, it's a threat.

Shadow checked his conscience. It was quiet, which did not, he had observed, in a prison, mean that he was not in deep shit.

'Call no man happy,' said Shadow, 'until he is dead.'

This is all well and good, allowed the Count. But what is rarely related is the fact that Life is every bit as devious as Death. It too can wear a hooded coat. It too can slip into town, lurk in an alley, or wait in the back of a tavern.