Quotes from Scott B. Smith

By doing one wrong thing, I thought I could make everything right.

I didn't feel evil. I felt nervous, scared, nothing more.

Stacy wasn't certain; she'd never bothered to pay attention to details like that, and was always regretting it, the half knowing, which felt worse than not knowing at all, the constant sense that she had things partly right, but not right enough to make a difference.

Maybe there isn't a way," he said. "Maybe all we can do is wait and hope and endure for as long as we're able. The food will run out. Our bodies will fail. And the vine will do whatever it's going to do.

That was what they were so clearly doing here: they were waiting. And not in any suspense, either, not in any anxiety as to the outcome of their vigil. They were waiting with no apparent emotion at all, as one might sit over the course of an evening, watching a candle methodically burn itself into darkness, never less than certain of the outcome, confident that the only thing standing between now and the end of waiting was time itself.

It waits till we're weak before it reveals its strength.

all the lies people utter around death in order to comfort themselves, to bury their grief with the body, but here, suddenly, they were true. Die, Eric said in his head. Do it now, just die. And all the while—yes, implacably, inexorably—the Greek's breathing continued its ragged course.

Stacy waited till she was certain he'd fallen asleep, then slipped free of his grasp, edging backward, leaving his hand lying open on the tent's floor, palm up, slightly cupped, like a beggar's. She imagined dropping a coin into it, late at night on some dark city street; she pictured herself hurrying off, never to see him again.

poor Yorick of infinite jest.

Recalls The Treasure of the Sierra Madre, the better work of Jim Thompson (The Grifters; After Dark, My Sweet) and Thomas Berger's tales of small-town souls who succumb to murderous mayhem.