Quotes from Michael Marshall Smith

You can send people letters, and show them photos, but they can never come to visit where you live. Unless you love them. And then they can burn it down.

My limited experience of such things told me that you get closest to the truth by not giving it advance warning that you're coming after it.

Cross-legged on the floor, you drink, hoping each mouthful will hurt; occasional flurries of spastic movement as you try to work out what to do with your hands. When everyone else is gone, your world is just a tiny box with the walls pressing in. Messages on the phone you can't bear to play, much less listen to, and nothing in the apartment that you can recognize as meaningfully yours.

When you let it get personal, the cost becomes personal too. You're opening your own heart here. You sure you want to do that?" "I'd do it for free. For the bullshit you are, and have always been." "Disbelief is easy, Kane. It's faith that takes courage, and character.

Disbelief is easy, Kane. It's faith that takes courage, and character.

The greatest hazard of all, losing one's self, can occur very quietly in the world, as if it were nothing at all. No other loss can occur so quietly; any other loss—an arm, a leg, five dollars, a wife, etc.—is sure to be noticed. —Søren Kierkegaard The Sickness Unto Death

know how much difference a night's sleep can make, that what seems ungovernable and world-breaking at one A.M. can be made to feel like someone else's dream if you put seven hours of unconsciousness between it and you. Tomorrow's not just another day, another person lives it—and every time you go to sleep, you say good-bye.

She lost her fury. He'd had none. That's how you win, in the end.

Humans and stories need each other. We tell them, but they tell us too – reaching with soft hands and wide arms to pull us into their embrace. They do this especially when we have become mired in lives of which we can make no sense. We all need a path, and stories can sometimes usher us back to it.

Being me is not a fate everyone would enjoy. There are risks, and frequent disappointments. I'm not all that keen on the arrangement myself, to be honest.

I shut my eyes, turned away for a moment, and it came: a shiver of finality like the one when you decide, in your own mind, that you're going to have to tell someone who loves you that you don't want to be with them anymore. Terror, and relief; relief and terror, so intermingled that they feel like the same thought.

My father used to claim that inanimate objects hate us and plot our downfall behind our backs. He was probably right.

Welcome to adulthood. Please leave your dreams at the door.

You can't have made-up things in made-up stories. But in real life, you can.

What they are is a small tablet about six inches square, which has a screen in it. As you walk it shows a scrolling digital map of the area you're in, telling you what each store you pass sells, who lives in what block, the whole works, updated by small beacons on every street corner. If you tap in a destination the screen shows you a red line to follow, and the tablet whispers at you to tell you when to make a turn.

I realised suddenly that I was thirty-four and not making a very good job of it.

But digging up the roots of chaos is like saying it's not the moment the car hits you that's important, or the split second when you step off the curb without looking. You can argue that as soon as you stopped checking when you crossed the street, that's when the trouble really began. The moment of impact is what you remember, however. That breathless instant of screech and thud, the second when the car hits and all other futures are canceled.

I caught one last glimpse of her face, howling something at me. There were too many vowels in what she said, and they were in an unkind order. (Substitutions)

Never ask questions if you might not want to know the answers, lest you are pulled into those stories and the truths they reveal. Sometimes ignorance is better. It would probably not be so popular otherwise.

Hannah's dad had a habit of never walking home the same way twice, with the intention of giving her a sense of how it all fitted together. What he'd actually achieved was to fail to provide a dependable route. As she stood confused on the corner, turning in a circle, it struck Hannah this happened all the time - grown-ups trying to teach you things in the wrong way, their way, that only made sense if you already knew what you were trying to learn.

you have become all the things you have done and thought, and now can't undo or unthink.

She didn't know what made him happy, though … and she couldn't remember him doing any of those things – laughing, smiling or being silly – for quite a while. From some time before Mom left, in fact. Was that why she'd gone? Because he hadn't laughed any more? Would you leave someone because of something like that? Did you have to keep laughing and smiling and seeming happy or else people would leave you?

Hell is not a place. It's not a noun, child. It's a verb.

In the months of her slow death, she'd made little notes in a book, jotted down memories of her early life, as if gathering fallen leaves to her chest, to stop them from being scattered and lost by the coming winds.