Quotes from Timothy Hallinan

Life is a gift. If we don't live it well, we are being ungrateful. And we have to love the ones who journey with us." (A Nail Through the Heart)

She gave me the slow nod women use to indicate that they understand our pain, they admire the courage with which we handle it, and they're absolutely certain that it's all our fault.

What was it like, being married to six actresses?" "Like being married to one of them. They're all pretty much alike." "Why'd you keep doing it, then?" "Hope is the thing with feathers," Trent said, "that tickles your scrotum at the moments when you most need a clear head.

She drove as though a fortune-teller had warned her about the day.

And you know women, they're both back there turning it into the crime of the century. Planting it in a little garden in the center of their hearts and watering it with feelings . Talking about it, sharing it. You're a cheat, you're a heartbreaker, you're like a museum exhibit, Everything That's Wrong with Guys.

I'd learned early that fatness in a book wasn't a warning sign, but rather a promise that you would be allowed to remain in its world for a longer time.

I let one of the men rename me. A man gave me the name Rose – you didn't know that, did you, Poke?…He said, this man, he said that Kwan was too hard to remember, even though it's a good name and it means 'spirit,' and that the rose was the queen of flowers and I was the queen of Patpong." She laughs, rough as a cough. "The queen of Patpong. A kingdom of whores and viruses. Death with a smile.

Ain't never gone to be no asshole shortage. We got oil shortages, grain shortages, coal shortages, every kind of fuckin' shortage you can think of, but there ain't no asshole shortage. Assholism is a dominant trait.

St. Francis of Assisi: Start by doing what's necessary; then do what's possible; and suddenly you will be doing the impossible.

The chuckle is a perfectly acceptable form of laughter.

Textual elision," Tyrone volunteered. "Lotta times, elided material, the stuff that doesn't make it into a text is what's most important. Didn't make it because whoever wrote the text thought it was self-evident." "Thank you," I said. "I'll keep that in mind the next time I'm trapped in a room with a primary-source document.

Whole areas of my mind, I have come to realize, distrust other areas.

Does the guy move around much? If he's more mobile than, say, the average couch, Cho will probably lose him.

I heard what I'd learned against my will to identify as new age music. Aimless and spacey, it meandered from unresolved keyboard chord to unresolved keyboard chord with some somnolent noodling in place of melody. Drooling pianos, music to sleepwalk by.

A shrill, glass-endangering scream of outrage from the direction of the stage yanked me around just in time to see the guitarist swing his gleaming back Stratocaster at the drummer's head. He struck with the kind of accuracy that comes only with years of practice and/or extremely vivid wishful thinking.

So you don't think the government is responsible for anything?" "Oh, it's responsible," Rafferty says. "It's responsible for the sloppiness and imprecision of the War on Terror, for example. It's responsible for taking people's tax dollars and spending the country into debt on useless wars and pointless pork projects to buy votes. It's responsible for bailing out the banks instead of standing up for the people the banks cheated. It's responsible for plenty,

Life is just there, to be made the best of, until it isn't. And that's all right, too.

Fixers don't get their hands dirty.

We all have our paradigms," I said. "Every generation has different ones. For my generation, it's books with covers. For yours it's selfies and what you ate for lunch and dwarfs doing calisthenics on YouTube.

I'm an optimist in spite of a lifetime of evidence to prove that living optimistically is likely to be as disappointing as taking astrological advice,

I took my own divinity where I could find it, and most of the time it was measured in small sips, usually delivered through natural beauty and acts of unprovoked kindness.

The late-morning sunlight was discovering 24-karat gold in Ronnie's hair, which was in the kind of multidimensional tangle predicted by chaos theory, like a foam of whipped Mobius loops.

If my life is a house," she said, "you haven't even gotten to the living room.

The percentage of the world's murder victims who are killed in libraries is statistically negligible.