Quotes from Brian Hodge

My first crime novel, "Wild Horses," sold at auction, and that changed my life at an ideal time.

Nothing can play havoc with your sense of scale better than looking deeply into the night skies. It can leave you feeling immense and privileged one minute, minuscule and insignificant the next.

Some dreams never leave you, because they're more than just dreams. They're truth, distilled to purest potency.

Let me see what I can come up with,' she said, and seemed to take a new satisfaction in it now. Something wrong to do, a law to break, and if she was lucky she might even get to steal, and it must have been then that everything changed between us and each of us didn't just have a neighbor to pass the time with but the closest thing either of us could find to a friend. ("Just Outside Our Windows, Deep Inside Our Walls")

Sometimes we sleep because we want to, sometimes because we need it, and sometimes we sleep in self-defense.

Of all the things I'd imagined in nightmares and dreams of dead things, the woman who gripped my leg was the worst and my last.

Without wonder, there's no progress. Nothing gets done, nobody goes anywhere. If you don't exercise your capacity for wonder... well, use it or lose it. A civilization without wonder is a civilization that's starting to atrophy and die.

So, not at first, but I eventually realized I was seeing this level of reality that's going on right over our heads and most people have no idea it's even there. I realized I was seeing the night sky as our ancestors did, and that by losing it, we'd lost our everyday touch with our place in the cosmos.

For the first time she realized she'd spent so much time mourning a world that had ended ages ago, hoping to resurrect it, that she'd never paid attention to what it was becoming. Or returning to again, now that it was unfettered. Where were the centaurs, she might have asked instead. Where were the gorgons, the furies, the giants and the gods?

Of hope and optimism I have none … because instead I have experience. I know the reception I'll meet with.

Sometimes it seems as if the best technology is still only catching up to what nature has already figured out.

uncharacteristic sorrow he showed one evening as he contemplated the stars and confessed, "I really thought we'd be out there by now. I really did. But we've become a complacent species without will.

she mounts him, positioning herself above his permanent erection, lowering herself until they are joined. She rocks, front to back, and tries to tell herself that a fleeting glimpse into Stefan's eyes doesn't really register his fear. She's careful, never reckless, knowing full well that if she were to let go with too much abandon, she could snap him off at the root. Leave him like an ancient statue, emasculated by vandalism, or erosion and acid rain.

The oaks were a mellow orange, the maples a blazing red, the birches a creamy yellow, and then ippy air between them was suffused with the golden light of late afternoon. It bit gently, with a promise of winter and the icy teeth to come.

His could be the seductive face of an angel or a devil. A single stroke by the artist — or a vandal — could tilt it in favor of one or the other.

They were just…looking for something to believe in. They weren't much into thinking for themselves. So I did their thinking for them.

My mutilation was accomplished when I was a child of seven. I no longer remember myself any other way.

The greatest irony about what drove me from the Order of St. Francis is that it was nothing that hadn't been experienced by the very founder himself, nearly 800 years before.

Say what you will of the Romans, they were no incompetents when it came to killing. They knew better than to nail some poor bugger up by his palms; the bones are too small.

They were common law wed, no preachers involved. You can guess how that set with the more churchy types. Which was probably most of them. Still is. They pick and choose what suits them. 'A man shall not lay with another man,' they're good about latching on to parts like that. But 'Judge not, lest ye be judged,' that goes in one ear and out the other.

Too many people around here, they've lost themselves inside a lifetime of Dominion theology. They may not know the term, but they've got the principles down cold. Go back some generations, our ancestors had it right. They saw themselves as stewards of the earth. Now it's all about how God gave them dominion over everything, so they've got every right to do whatever they want with it.

A new truth doesn't win out by convincing its opponents it's right. They're too entrenched, even when it's obvious how wrong they are. The truth just has to outlive them, wait for them to clear out of the way, until what's left are the people who grow up familiar with it.

Timothy supposed this was what you got when you crossed youthful idealism with anger and a sense of futility. And weed.

Things beneath the earth could always endure time better than those above it.