Quotes from Don Winslow

The NRA assholes will tell you that "guns don't kill people, people do." Yeah, Malone thinks, people with guns.

A lot of existential questions will be answered just after the "Fuck." As in life itself.

you do not avenge a murder by killing—you avenge it by living.

His old priests might have told him there's sins of commission not omission. It's not always the things you do but the things you don't do that will cost you your soul. Sometimes it's not the spoken lie but the unspoken truth that opens the door to betrayal.

Life is trying to kill us," she says. Life, Malone thinks, is trying to kill everyone. And it always succeeds. Sometimes before you die.

Tell me you don't want to do those women on Fox News," Jimena says. "Tell me you don't," Giorgio counters. "Anyway, of course I do. I want to convert them through the subversive power of the orgasm." "So it would be a political act," Jimena says. "I am willing to sacrifice myself for the cause," Giorgio answers.

We will go to heaven or we will go to hell, but we will go together.

Left-wing lesbians are perfectly natural," Giorgio says, "but there's something about a right-wing lesbian that's, I don't know…almost North American. Sort of Fox News–ish.

He tells his guys, you change the oil in a Nissan, you just can't kill it. You'll die before that car will.

Now he seeks truth in silence. He seeks God in the same, although he has come to believe that truth and God are the same. Truth, stillness, and God.

You call the wolf, you get the pack.

Sad Fact of Life— Smart people sometimes get stupid, but stupid people never get smart. Never. Ever.

Simon drove as if he knew something about physics that Einstein hadn't thought of and God never intended. If nature abhorred a vacuum, Simon positively loathed one, and rushed to fill in the tiniest gap in the heavy flow of speeding traffic. He passed on the right, left, center, and all variations in between, and the Keble responded as if involved in some kind of blood compact with its human master.

I don't know what the hell I was doing, all right?! 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.

When the devil comes, he comes on angel's wings.

Americans take their strength in victories, Mexicans' strength is in their ability to suffer loss.

We are all cripples, Keller thinks, limping together through this crippled world. It's what we owe to each other. Chuy goes inside. Keller sits outside on a bench and waits. The words of the psalm come back to him— "Be still and know that I am God." There is nothing to do but be still.

Perhaps loneliness—it is that loneliest time of the night, the predawn darkness when the worst dreams come, the sunrise seems far off, and the creatures that inhabit both the real world and the darker edges of the unconscious prowl with the impunity of predators who know that their prey is helpless and alone.

Let freedom ring / let the white dove sing / let the whole world know that today is a day of reckoning. As epigraph to Part III, quoting lyrics, Gretchen Peters, "Independence Day

You know the word 'barbarian' came from the Romans? It meant 'redheaded.' They was talking about you people. I saw that on the—what do you call it?—the History Channel, last night.

Maybe, Keller thinks, I've become too used to solitude. Maybe I like it too much.

As for corruption, who's more corrupt—the seller or the buyer? And how corrupt does a society have to be when its citizens need to get high to escape their reality, at the cost of bloodshed and suffering of their neighbors?

the old "4-4-40" rough standard for human survival: four minutes without air, four days without water, forty days without food.

You can either love," Pablo says, "or you can talk about it. You can't do both.