Quotes from Ilsa J. Bick

There are those individuals who die for a cause, and we say they have made the ultimate sacrifice. We call them martyrs, and we never doubt their sincerity. Yet many others search their entire lives for something—or someone—worth dying for and this is very different. These are the lonely and the desperate, fearful that their lives have no meaning. They yearn for the bullet, if only someone else will pull the trigger.

The grief in her green eyes slips then hardens and, for an instant, Pendleton sees the woman she has become and has no right being, not at sixteen.

I am a ghost in a land of phantoms and forgotten nightmares.

As a doc, though, I've seen what happens when people are under a lot of stress. Doesn't always bring out their best. When people are scared, they get angry. They'll do things they never thought they would. They'll bargain and compromise in order to survive; they'll chase after miracle cures and believe just about anything so long as it gives them hope. When hope fails, then watch out. Some people get brutal. They'll turn on each other; they'll become their own worst enemies.

What you couldn't see and only imagined was always scarier than what was real.

Honestly, Bob: how do you carve a scream?

When the heart sinks, people fall.

For that matter, my heart is broken. So maybe they´?l give me his. It´s something to shoot for. And maybe, in all that, Bob? There is forgiveness...

People drown, quietly, before our eyes, all the time.

The things you think about when you're a hair's breath away from getting yourself killed.

Not everyone wears their scars on their skin.

I don't know what I expected. No, I'm lying. I know what I wanted.

she said all writers were prima donnas, drunks, social misfits, pompous, or depressed. Brilliant, maybe, but completely crazy.

That pain moves when you move; it mutters between every breath; it spikes your ears; it rips. You think pain can't be any more horrible than that. Until you discover that the well is bottomless. There's always more.

Tell yourself you're dead, the way Matt does, so the past can't hurt you.

You know, Bob, school is school, one of those life experiences we kids all have to get through in order to become you. Then we wonder what all the fuss was about, especially while we're cleaning up your little messes: toxic waste, war, bank bailouts. Honestly, if we ran up debt the way you guys do? You'd ground us, take away our cells, and make us clean toilets with a toothbrush until we'd pay back every penny.

With no sense of smell, your memories dropped like pennies out of a ripped pocket, until the past was ashes and your parents were blanks: nothing more than the holes in Swiss cheese.

I´d never heard a man cry before, Bob, but...it´s awful. (...) I think some man aren´t used to it and don´t know what to do with all that feeling. Their emotions are hexane ignited in their chests and rips them apart, and then they feel like they´re going to die-just as something was dying, at that moment in Mitch.

Don't get so caught up in looking behind you forget to look ahead.

I gargled a laugh, but I'd never felt more like crying in my life. "I'm fine.

Monster or not, he was risking his neck to save her.

So I think I'll stay here a little while longer. There's plenty of time to get off this gurney and open that door and rejoin the rest of you. There's all the time I have left on Earth. There's the rest of my life.

I am a ghost in a land of phantoms and remembered nightmares.

I doubted I would need my eyes. I drew in the dark, after all.