Quotes from Don Winslow

In un epoca di relativismo morale, dare la tua parola non significa tanto, immagino. Ma mio padre mi aveva insegnato che è l'unica cosa che hai che nessuno potrà mai portarti via. L'unica cosa che puoi dare e allo stesso tempo mantenere.

The suits love their numbers, Malone thinks. This new management breed of cops are like the sabermetrics baseball people. They believe the numbers say it all, and when the numbers don't say what they want them to, they massage them like Koreans on Eighth Avenue until they get a happy ending.

What's the problem?" Fuck it, Art thought. Too late now. So he answered, "That we look at 'these people' like 'targets.

Grande is Mexico's harshest and most secure prison, and

prefer married women and expensive whores. You have a nice meal, a few laughs, a good fuck, and then you each go back to your own lives. It's better that way." So

Everyone thought the mob was done after RICO.... And they were. Then the Towers came down. Overnight, the feds shifted three-quarters of their personnel into anti-terrorism and the mob made a comeback. Shit, they even made a fortune overcharging for debris removal from Ground Zero.... 9/11 saved the mafia.

The Mexicans have finally found a drug that white trash likes and can afford. And one thing you ain't never gonna run out of is white trash.

I'll look out for him," Keller said. Because he needs to. Call it penance, call it atonement or whatever the hell you want, he only knows that he needs to do it, that he can only find redemption by helping this boy find his, by showing love to what he hates, that at the end of the day or the end of the world, there are no separate souls. We will go to heaven or we will go to hell, but we will go together.

America's longest war is the war on drugs.

If the world played fair, he'd play fair. But the cards are stacked against the prosecutors and police. Miranda, Mapp, all the other Supreme Court decisions, give the advantage to the skels.

Behavior that was cute when you were in your twenties becomes aggravating in your thirties, pathetic in your forties and tragic in your fifties.

There has always been philosophical speculation on the question, What if there were no God? Keller thinks as he walks through the slush. But no one has really asked, much less answered, the question, What if there were no Satan?

It only makes sense, he thinks, that people whose only loyalty is to money would find each other. Shit seeks its own level.

You live in El Paso, you're a pocho, an Americanized Mexican, and no one can tell Pablo that it doesn't change you. You shop in malls instead of mercados, you watch football instead of fútbol, you become another consumer in a giant machine that consumes consumers.

looks out at a wave breaking like a white pencil being drawn across a blue piece of paper.

This train carries saints and sinners. This train carries losers and winners. This train carries whores and gamblers. This train carries lost souls…   Canción popular

The toll of the "Mall shooting" was horrific, but not as bad as it could have been. Five dead and fourteen wounded. The aftermath was the usual—thoughts and prayers and talk about gun control and mental health and then absolutely nothing was done.

This is what Mexican cops appreciate that American cops don't. We are partners, mi hermano Arturo, in the same enterprise. Comrades in the War on Drugs. We could not exist without each other.

Keller had a professor in college who said that civilization was a matter of plumbing. That basically, the infrastructure for moving clean water in and filthy water out is what allowed people to congregate in large populations in permanent dwellings and create cities and cultures. Otherwise, people had to be nomads to literally escape their own shit.

It's the new face of narco gang war, isn't it? They're becoming media savvy. They used to hide their crimes, now they publicize them. I wonder if they haven't taken a page from Al Qaeda. What good is an atrocity if no one knows you did it? And maybe that's the lede on my story. "The crimes that used to lurk in shadows now seek the sunlight," or is that a little too "pulp"? Óscar will decide.

Lesson: Don't hold on to something's going to pull you into a trap. If you're going to let go, let go early. Better yet, don't take the bait at all.

Shit," Pablo says.

You're a big boy," Ana observes, staring blankly into her cup. "You could have said no." "I stand with Oscar Wilde on the subject of temptation.

He writes mostly about crime, although if he can talk Óscar into it he'll do "color" features