Every Dead Thing

She was plump, with dyed red hair and a face so caked with cosmetics that the floor of the Amazon jungle probably saw more natural light...

For a moment they still lived and I experienced their deaths as a fresh loss with each waking, so that I was unsure whether I was a man waking from a dream of death or a dreamer entering a world of loss, a man dreaming of unhappiness or a man waking to grief.

Why did you shoot him?" "You weren't around," I replied, my teeth gritted in pain. "If you'd been here I'd have shot you instead.

When she was taken from me it was like the death of a world, an infinite number of futures coming to an end.

I believe in evil because I have touched it, and it has touched me.

In the end, you have to let things go. The things you regret are the things you hold on to.

Frank tried to look like he was wrestling with his conscience, although he couldn't have found his conscience without a shovel and an exhumation order.

I slipped from present to past, sliding down the snake heads of memory into what was and what would never be again.

The evolutionary curve obviously sloped pretty gently where Six came from.

THERE ARE NO COINCIDENCES, only patterns we do not see.

Sometimes we need our pain. We need it to call our own.

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.

the more of us there are, the more distant from each other we become. We’re practically livin’ on top of each other but we’re further away from each other in every other way than we’ve ever been before.

We’re the world’s leading producer of serial killers. It’s a sign of sickness, is what it is. We’re sick and weak and these killers are like a cancer inside us: the faster we grow, the quicker they multiply.

could see that there were no shell casings on

I read somewhere that the New Orleans citizenry bought fewer copies of the New York Times than any other city in the United States, although they made up for it by buying more formal wear than anywhere else. If you’re going out to formal dinners every evening, you don’t get much time to read the New York Times.

And I knew, too, that to live a life like Walter Cole’s—a life almost mundane in the pleasure it derived from small happinesses and the beauty of the familiar, but uncommon in the value it attached to them—was something to be envied.

On the day of the funeral he had stood behind me in the rain and let the water wash over him, the drops falling from the brim of his hat like tears

El jefe de personal se hacía llamar jefe de recursos humanos y, como los jefes de personal de todo el mundo, era una de las personas menos afables que uno podía encontrarse.

Behold not Death’s Heads til thou doest not see them, nor look upon mortifying objects til thou overlook’st them.