Quotes from Toby Barlow

Cloaked there in that petrified darkness, crammed shoulder to shoulder with the breath of their fear on her neck, she learned that coward was often only another name for survivor.

Nothing is as good as the smell of horse shit. You know, the streets are swept clean now, and all the horses are gone, so there is nothing in the air but the soot of your burning engines…that's why I like to sleep in a barn, to be close to real smells. Horse shit and horse farts. Those are the smells of real life.

Monkeys What! His partner said. Monkeys are funny, said Peabody.'So why didn't we we pick monkeys. His partner sighed and shook his head with sad dismay. Monkeys? Jesus. Monkeys' idea of fun is throwing their shit at you. Monkeys always take the joke a step too far.

she described her vision of life as an enormous great act held within an infinite and immutable instant, one where she was present both as a witness and a participant.

She killed her sons first. Hammering a long fence nail through each of their hearts. Then, taking an ax, she methodically beheaded each one of her brothers-in-law. Going out to the pens, she drove the livestock into the barn, bolting it shut, and while the goat kids and spring lambs panicked and brayed, she put all the buildings to flame.

He recalled his grandfather telling him that the only success that mattered was having a job where no one had to cover for you when you went to take a leak.

But in all these tales the dog is the innocent shooting star we all wish upon until it burns up, aging fast and disappearing behind our jagged horizons. Each dog marks a section of our lives, and in the end, we feed them to the dark, burying them there while we carry on.

It seemed Paris somehow managed to absorb all the beautiful things the rest of the world discarded; it was a sparkling and bejeweled box of lost treasures, a wondrous cabinet that hummed with soft horn harmonies played against a grand piano's minor chords.

Any fool could seduce, but it took a true intellect to know and love his partner.

Will was not surprised that his new friend was late. Oliver seemed to possess that sort of joie de vivre that did not lend itself to punctuality.

It led to the unrelenting hunger of hearts, to lustful, searching eyes, and creeping, confident hands, to souls who believed that what they could touch they could own.

After all, a great number of history's spies had undoubtedly begun as the unfortunate victims of set-ups and extortion, but the faultless roots of their errors did not matter much to the firing squad.

Ghosts, they say, stay for three simple reasons: they love life too wholly to leave, they love some other too deeply to part, or they need to linger on for a bit, to coax a distant knife toward its fated throat.

He realized how little he knew, how unimaginably vast the universe was, and how its emptiness was only another word for mystery.

You have to want to save someone in order to be saved.

Instead of taking the elevator, Gwen climbed the stairs. Following her up, Will thought there must be circles of heaven where all one did was ascend staircases behind slender women wearing tight wool skirts.

The Nazis and Stalin were the most recent examples, interrogating and torturing innocent citizens until, finally, desperate to mollify their tormentors, the accused denounced their equally innocent neighbors.

Crystalizing within Will was the realization that what he was being asked to participate in now was in a way no different, it was the awful conveyor belt of history, a butcher's carnival where ultimately no one innocent escaped, they lost their jobs and homes, or their throats were cut and they were dumped in bloody piles. The only ones who ever seemed to get away were the guilty.