Quotes from Stephen Hunter

You're a genius," she said. "Hardly," he said. "I just show up and pay attention.

The worst moment was always taps. It didn't matter if the bugler played it well or poorly, in tune or out; there was something in the mournful ache of the music, and how it spoke of men dying before their time for something they only vaguely understood and being only vaguely appreciated by the people on whose behalf they died, that made it hurt so much.

These in the day when heaven was falling, when earth's foundations fled, followed their mercenary calling, took their wages and are dead.

As I said, the good die young, and the motherfuckers go on forever, pardon my French.

Okay," he said, "I'm going in." He turned to Swagger. "Sorry, old guy. A world where she dies so I can survive isn't a world I choose to live in.

Some are born jerks" she said, "some have jerkhood thrust upon them, and some mature into rich and vibrant jerks. You are all three.

Yeats said, 'Men of action, when they lose all belief, believe only in action.

A man may lie to his psychiatrist, his doctor, his wife, his employer, to God and to Mom, but his teeth tell all;

Your idealism will get you killed or, worse, knighted, and you'll spend the rest of your days among fools and MPs. As for me, the chance to refuse an audience with the queen would be exquisite.

He wanted to get away: this was like something out of Faulkner or Penn Warren, blasphemed southern ground, soaked in blood a generation old, white trash and black, white innocence and black, all commingled in a very small area on the same day.

Our Director had a vision, Sheriff Swagger. He envisioned a scientific national police force, incorruptible, untainted by ego, vanity, and politics. Alas, as we have learned, that also meant untainted by experience, toughness, cunning, and marksmanship. Lawyers make poor gunfighters.

I spent my life trying to get out of Oklahoma because I was too good for Oklahoma. Then I got to the Ivy League and the people seemed to be so, you know, little. They were fundamentally bigots. They

What he called his own personal night was about the feeling of being nothing, of having no worth, of having spent himself in a war nobody cared about, and having given up everything that was important and good.

But shooting a man takes one of two things: an overwhelming fear of one's own death, which Nick did not have in the least; or conviction. It turned out he lacked this component as well.

And then there are the Germans. Do you know, they form words by just sticking them together, so that their word for 'Gatling gun' literally translates into 'mechanicaldeviceshootingwithoutcockingrifle?' The words get longer still. No word is too long for a German because it's quite impossible to bore a German. You cannot entertain a Norwegian, you cannot bore a German, and you cannot educate an American or a chimpanzee.

You are the most contrary man I ever met. If someone handed you a glass of free beer that was nine-tenths full, you'd cry over the missing tenth.

I was in a delirium of destruction, as if the body were an insult to the philosophy of my life, and only in destroying it could I reclaim my sanity.

The public library was more accommodating;

You know that easy money, stupid people, and hard times have a way of creating misery.

If they's interested, they wouldn't believe it. If they believed it, they'd arrest me.

He who controls the past controls the future. He who controls the present controls the past.

There is a paradox at the core of penology, and from it derives the thousand ills and afflictions of the prison system. It is that not only the worst of the young are sent to prison, but the best—that is, the proudest, the bravest, the most daring, the most enterprising and the most undefeated of the poor. There starts the horror. —Norman Mailer's introduction to In the Belly of the Beast by Jack Henry Abbott No one knows what it's like to be the bad man.

No one knows what it's like to be the bad man. —Peter Townsend, "Behind Blue Eyes

Because I'm too old for tragedy. I like a nice happy ending too.