Quotes from Don Winslow

Crime 101, Davis thinks. Always do what Steve McQueen would do.

La speranza non muore in modo rapido e pulito, come un ramo che si spezza sotto il peso di una nevicata. Appassisce lentamente come una pianta non annaffiata.

Now he's standing beside five other cops watching the chimp climb up the wall of the Museum of Man. That's what I need tonight, Chris thinks, a chimp with a firearm and a sense of irony.

Smart people sometimes get stupid, but stupid people never get smart.

If you let people believe that you are weak, sooner or later you're going to have to kill them.

Also: do not fuck with someone until you know exactly who the fuck you're fucking with. And then don't do it.

You don't let them knock you out, you make them knock you out. You make them break their fucking hands knocking you out, you let them know that they've been in a fight, you give them something to remember you by every time they look in a mirror.

I don't recognize myself. I don't know who I am anymore." And it's all fun and games until someone loses an I.

Your strengths are your weaknesses. The more you try to protect something, the more vulnerable you make it.

The Americans take a product that literally grows on trees and turn it into a valuable commodity. Without them, cocaine and marijuana would be like oranges, and instead of making billions smuggling it, I'd be making pennies doing stoop labor in some California field, picking it.

And it's all fun and games until someone loses an I.

would have' is just another way of saying 'didn't.

Truth, justice and the American way. The American way is: truth and justice maybe say hello in the hallway, send each other a Christmas card, but that's about the extent of their relationship.

Maybe money can't buy happiness, but it can rent it for a long time.

When you ask people, "What's America's longest war?" they usually answer "Vietnam" or amend that to "Afghanistan," but it's neither. America's longest war is the war on drugs.

Smart people sometimes get stupid, but stupid people never get smart. Never. Ever. 'You can come down the evolutionary ladder,' Chon has observed to Ben and O; 'you can't climb up.

She's also ruthless - it's love me or off with your head. She's the Red Queen

This is Tío's genius—he knows that a man who would never have the weakness to set a great evil into motion doesn't have the strength to stop it once it's moving. That the hardest thing in the world isn't to refrain from committing an evil, it's to stand up and stop one.

I'm not— Lady Macbeth Lucrezia Borgia Catherine the Great. I am —a woman doing what she has to do. I am —the woman you made me. Elena is at war.

The past isn't in the past. It's always with us. In our history. Our minds, our blood.

Just across the bridge is the gigantic marketplace, the insatiable consumer machine that drives the violence here. North Americans smoke the dope, snort the coke, shoot the heroin, do the meth, and then have the nerve to point south (down, of course, on the map), and wag their fingers at the "Mexican drug problem" and Mexican corruption.

He feels ennui depression adrift in his life. Purposeless, perhaps because —dig a well in the Sudan and thejanjaweed come in and shoot the people anyway —buy mosquito nets and the boys you save grow up to —rape women —set up cottage industries in Myanmar and the army —steals them and uses the women as slaves and Ben is starting to be afraid that he is starting to share Chon's opinion of the human species that people are basically shit.

Hell isn't having no choice. It's having to make a choice between horrific things.

This violent state of mind. This violent state of mine.