Quotes from Christopher G. Moore

The bodhi tree has been converted into a marriage tree. The belief is that young women who die before marriage should have a husband in the next world. Their relatives bring a wedding dress and monks to this tree and perform a wedding ceremony. The spirit of the dead woman is married to a famous singer, poet or magician who died many years ago. Their families believe that he'll be a good husband will look after each wife as if she were the only one.

To stay married, you need a fair amount of ignorance. Selective forgetting is what makes close proximity possible. It's what we forget about someone that lets us find some peace, some happiness.

The future is a fight against a model of reality that is a monopoly, controlled by the powerful and formidably defended against dissent.

The best crime fiction is not so much a search and rescue mission, but a recovery mission.

That was the grand bargain with evil. No wrong ever got righted, any more than a hangman's rope was ever unknotted and used as a child's swing.

My goal is to live far outside of history as possible. History is a territory where mostly bad things happen to good people.

Rumors in Thailand don't have fathers or mothers. They're orphans of loan sharks, con men, streetwalkers, and fortune tellers. No one claims them until they become legitimate.

I'd rather go broke giving enemas to house lizards than make money from customers like him. Old George made a fist and thrust it toward the water buffalo mounted on the wall above his head.

I've heard that you're in the pain business. I don't like doing work for that kind of man," said Vincent Calvino. Casey rolled his neck and a small cracking noise echoed from the bones inside. "If you worked only for people you liked, you wouldn't cover your rent.

It was now hard to believe how difficult it had once been to follow a person in Bangkok in a time before smart phones and social media. The new generation demanded to be followed online. It was in their digital blood. A small investment in a few specialized apps, and not even Sherlock Holmes in his most inspired opium dreams could have imagined the possibilities.

My grandfather said the sfumato described a psychological and spiritual transition between states of being. This transition was infinite and that's why we, living in the finite, didn't understand it. Some called it the Void. But that wasn't sfumato. We chased the Smoky Dragon. We rode the dragon. We were the dragon. Finite time was our dance audition. Eternity was opening night.

Let me share what I've learned about Thai politics. Keep a distance from those doing a victory dance in the end zone unless you understand their game, how it's scored and how many players each side has. If you can't figure out the rules of the game, you won't know when the game has started and when it's over. Don't put a bet on a game you don't understand.

Calvino) had long ago accepted that his business model as a private investigator in Bangkok needed to incorporate spirit house offerings, lizard and gecko yammering, fortune tellers' predictions of auspicious days and times, and Chinese reading of faces and head shapes before any decision would be made. . .the day soon came when they no longer seemed crazy.

Thais have a saying about a frog living inside a coconut shell. The frog believes that the world inside the shell is the whole universe. In the private investigation business, Vincent Calvino had clients who like the frog. What they saw from inside their shell blinded them, made them unable to solve a problem. So they hired Calvino. He knew the drill. Shells offered comfort and security. Leaving could be a dangerous business.

The Bangkok Comfort Zone - that strip running between Patpong, Soi Cowboy and Nana - was a huge bank of ice, thick as a glacier. Only you had to be around years and years to see and feel the deep chill, and by the time you had it was too late, the glacier had already dragged you under.

All yings are time rats, time bandits. Open their guts and what you find inside their digestive tract are the second and minutes of hundreds of men's lives. Time cannibals. All those broken minute and hour hands just lying undigested in their stomach. It makes me want to drink.

Misfits, con artists, evildoers all had business cards. It was enough to make any man a bona fide misanthrope.

Asking if there is corruption in Thailand is like asking if there is dough inside a bakery. Pies and cakes don't come from heaven and neither do deals and contracts.

Wirot held up his card, and the

Feudalism, that discreet system of gentlemen gangsters and serfs, had never died out in the region, and was concealed in the trappings of modern buildings and streets. Only a lunatic would quarrel with his master; only a fool would not understand that he stood in the steel jaws of death his entire life.

The spirits of the young women are at rest," said Marley, "if you believe the legend." "I am believing that spirits never rest. That is their misfortune. They have no choice but to roam endlessly and never to arrive. It is our belief.

A judge without impartiality is like a priest without faith. Good faith in the judicial system is underscored by a belief in impartiality.

Each age recreates its own justice system and selects the judges and other personnel to run it. And in each age, the status, reputation, and standing of the judges is reinvented to suite the purposes of the day.

People lose faith in their political institutions, which can't control the scale and rate of technological disruptions, blaming politicians for events that few fully understand and all have limited ability to influence. The role of thinkers and writers amid these whirlwind of disruptions is to provide context and meaning to these forces and reveal how they are shaping modern choices about life.