“An interesting thing happened today,” she said, giving me just enough time to get the word “hi” out of my mouth. “I opened the front door and there was a man on my doorstep. A big man. A very big, very black man.”
“Rachel —”
“You said it would be discreet. His T–shirt had the words ‘Klan Killer’ written on the front.”
“I —”
“And do you know what he said?”
I waited.
“He handed me a note from Louis and told me he was lactose intolerant. That was it. Note. Lactose intolerant. Nothing else. He’s coming to the reading with me. It was all I could do to get him to change his T–shirt. The new one reads ‘Black Death.’ I’m going to tell people it’s a rap band. Do you think it’s a rap band?”
I figured it was probably his occupation, but I didn’t say that. Instead, I said the only thing I could think of to say.
“Maybe you’d better buy some soy milk.”
She hung up without saying good–bye.”
― John Connolly, quote from The White Road
“You still carrying an arsenal in the trunk of your car?”
“Why, you need something?”
“No, but if your car is hit by lightning I’ll know where my lawn went.”
― John Connolly, quote from The White Road
“So what you gonna do?”
“Push a stick into the beehive and rustle up some bees. The Larousses are hosting a party today. I think we should avail ourselves of their hospitality.”
“We got an invite?”
“Has not having one ever stopped us before?”
“No, but sometimes I just like to be invited to shit, you know what I’m sayin’, instead of havin’ to bust in, get threatened, irritate the nice white folks, put the fear of the black man on them.”
He paused, seemed to think for a while about what he had just said, then brightened.
“Sounds good, doesn’t it?” I said.
“Real good,” he agreed.”
― John Connolly, quote from The White Road
“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.”
― John Connolly, quote from The White Road
“THE AFRO-AMERICAN HAS BEEN HEIR TO THE MYTHS THAT IT IS BETTER TO BE POOR THAN RICH, LOWER-CLASS RATHER THAN MIDDLE OR UPPER, EASYGOING RATHER THAN INDUSTRIOUS, EXTRAVAGANT RATHER THAN THRIFTY AND ATHLETIC RATHER THAN ACADEMIC.”
― John Connolly, quote from The White Road
“So, how we doin'?"
"Same as usual: dead people, a mystery, more dead people."
"Who we lost?"
"The boy. His guardians. Maybe Elliot Norton."
"Shit, don't sound like we got anybody left. Anyone hires you better leave you your fee in their will.”
― John Connolly, quote from The White Road
John Connolly
Born place: in Dublin, Ireland
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“Blessed be the soul, and the Lord that keeps it in order; blessed be the day, and the Lord that drives it away.”
― Tim Powers, quote from On Stranger Tides
“What is the one emotion that you would like to feel for the rest of your life?”
― Alice Steinbach, quote from Without Reservations: The Travels of an Independent Woman
“And yet curiously enough I was also tormented by an almost irresistible impulse not to work. There were days when my heart sickened at the labours ahead of me, and I stood stupid as an animal before the most elementary difficulties. In the holidays, also, I could not work. Some of the scholarship boys received extra tuition from a certain Mr. Batchelor, a likeable, very hairy man who wore shaggy suits and lived in a typical bachelor’s “den”—booklined walls, overwhelming stench of tobacco—somewhere in the town. During the holidays Mr. Batchelor used to send us extracts from Latin authors to translate, and we were supposed to send back a wad of work once a week. Somehow I could not do it. The empty paper and the black Latin dictionary lying on the table, the consciousness of a plain duty shirked, poisoned my leisure, but somehow I could not start, and by the end of the holidays I would only have sent Mr. Batchelor fifty or a hundred lines. Undoubtedly part of the reason was that Sim and his cane were far away. But in term time, also, I would go through periods of idleness and stupidity when I would sink deeper and deeper into disgrace and even achieve a sort of feeble defiance, fully conscious of my guilt and yet unable or unwilling—I could not be sure which—to do any better.”
― George Orwell, quote from A Collection of Essays
“This is because the nature of this place is a strong emotion - "nostalgia" is their word for it - which means a longing for what has never been, or at least not in the form and shape imagined.”
― Doris Lessing, quote from Re: Colonised Planet 5, Shikasta
“Everybody’s got a cage that keeps out the sharks. Those who open the door and venture out do so at their own risk.”
― Michael Connelly, quote from City of Bones
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Worth The Fall
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