Quotes from Don Winslow

Libra mi cuello de la espada. Y mi vida de las garras del perro.

The good old days sucked.

You start by being idealistic, morally strong if you will, but then the rock of your moral strength is eroded, bit by bit, until you're, well, exhausted, and you do things that you never thought you would. Or you do things that you always feared you would.

You can no more cut yourself away from the past than you can cut out your own heart.

And maybe that's the best we can do in this world, he thinks as he gets up to resume watering the flowers—tend to the garden and maintain the hope of a God. Against all evidence to the contrary.

Crime 101: There's a word for a man who believes in coincidence: the defendant.

You're a hypocrite, he tells himself, using dirty dope money to get yourself clean, using other people's suffering to relieve your own, committing a mortal sin to save your soul.

he also thinks it's true of most people, that the best part of ourselves is trapped inside the worst part of ourselves and just can't manage to get out.

That makes the air very sweet, just being able to smell it and know you're going to keep smelling it. You're already ahead on your day.

Monsters are real, and ghosts are real, too. They live inside us, and sometimes, they win. —Stephen King

But there's no wall down there, Keller thinks, smiling. And there never will be. A border is something that divides us but also unites us; there can be no real wall, just as there is no wall that divides the human soul between its best impulses and its worst. Keller knows. He's been on both sides of the border. He takes Mari's hand and together they limp back down the hill.

And an epiphany—the only redemption for having a bad father is being a good one.

The cartel has bought the White House. We've crossed the border now.

I don't know about this," Cirello says. "What you don't know?" "Like why here?" Cirello asks, looking around. "All this empty space. Parking lot, a construction site …" "You scared, white?" "I'm not white, I'm Greek," Cirello says. "You see that movie, 300? Those were Greeks." "Didn't show that at V-Ville. Too gay.

Su hijo era una ortodoncia andante, con su factura correspondiente: cuando no estaba en el dentista, estaba encerrado en su habitación haciéndose pajas; y su hija estaba resentida por haber tenido que dejar a sus amigos de Glendora, sobre todo a un tal Travis al que Eddie estaba seguro de que le hacía mamadas.

Él que menos habla es el más chingón. He who speaks least has the most power.

Every second act, Reggie knows, is followed by a third.

He prays at the altar of dead false gods. Tries to hold up an image of what he thinks used to be but in fact didn't exist except maybe in the movies. The fuckin' guy wants so bad to be something that never was, even the ghost image of which is now fading into black.

Danny's like his old man," Pasco says. "Stubborn. You heard about Irish Alzheimer's? They forget everything but the grudges.

There are no humanitarians in cages

Se hallan en otro mundo, esa visión de túnel previa a una misión que desarrollan los combatientes natos; es algo parecido a un trance.

Rich or dead. There's worse choices.

This stretch of road is not where you want to fuck up. You slip on the kozmic banana peel coming down these switchbacks you are suddenly Lost in Space, man. You are Rocky the Flying Squirrel, you are air-borne... You can have eighteen wheel drive and it won't matter, if all those wheels are in the sky. What you don't have is wings, or a parachute, which is what you're going to need if you screw up the distinction between centrifugal and centripetal force on one of these curves.

Because he knows that the ghost has come back. And with it, the monster.