Quotes from Jeff Lindsay

Aside from the fruit basket, the room was as empty as the inside of Dexter on the shelf marked SOUL.

And so there we were, balanced on a knife edge that was unfortunately only metaphorical. Sooner or later, I had to be me. But until then I would see an awful lot of Rita. She couldn't hold a candle to my old flame, the Dark Passenger, but I did need my secret identity. And until I escaped Doakes, Rita was my cape, red tights, and utility belt—almost the entire costume.

Art was creating something new, not mimicking something already in existence. What

Dexter the sofa spud ...

Somehow I slogged through the gray soup of the rest of the day and made it all the way home to Rita's at the end of the day, where the soup gelled into an aspic of sensory deprivation.

Dexter did not kick the can. And now Dexter is It. Again. You may wonder, how can this be? How can Dexter's night hunt be reduced to this? Always before there has been some frightful twisted predator awaiting the special attention of frightful twisted Dexter—and here I am, stalking an empty Chef Boyardee ravioli can that is guilty of nothing worse than bland sauce.

A bag of meat that breathes, and when that stops, nothing but rotting garbage.

But to have a second person present, watching and taking pictures, turned a very private act into a kind of performance. It was absolutely indecent—the man was a pervert. If only I had been capable of moral outrage, I am quite sure I would have been full of it. As it was, though, I found myself more eager than ever to get viscerally acquainted with MacGregor.

I knew I was supposed to understand that Rita was actually saying something very specific, that her pauses and stutters added up to a great and marvelous thing that a human male would intuitively grasp. But I had not a single clue as to what it might be, nor how to figure it out. Should I count the breaths? Time the pauses and convert the numbers to Bible verses to arrive at the secret code? What was she trying to tell me? And why, for that matter, was she trying to tell me anything at all?

But hold on: Didn't I remember that the original language of the Bible was not Hebrew but something else? I beat my gray cells brutally, and they finally came out with it. Yes, it had been something I remembered from that unimpeachable scholarly source, Raiders of the Lost Ark. And the language I was looking for was Aramaic.

I read on. Aramaic, like Hebrew, did not use vowels. Instead, you had to supply them yourself.

I took a sip. The taste was bitter and thin, just as I would be if I had to keep the Dark Passenger buckled into his seat belt for very long.

Well, then, I think we can look forward to a very good harvest this year," I said, but neither one of them appeared to think that was worth even a tiny smile. Ah well, you do what you can to bring a little cheer into this dreary world, and if people refuse to respond to your efforts it's their loss.

I floated through the rest of the morning in my cloud of adrenaline and alienation, the whole time feeling as if I might split apart at the seams at any minute. But

It was a brilliant train of pure cool logic; I welcomed the return of my giant brain and mentally patted myself on the head. Good boy, Dexter. Arf arf.

And in any case, it was embarrassing, something you didn't really want to see, like watching somebody clean their nostrils with a fingertip. I cleared my throat as I came in to my chair, but he didn't look up.

He was in his mid-thirties and thin without looking fit, and he hadn't shaved for a few days. "Yes?" he said, in a querulous tone of voice that would have been just right for an eighty-year-old scholar. He cleared his throat and tried again. "What is it?

It was as if someone admitted they went through all the bother and mess of sex only in order to smoke a cigarette.

lived my adolescence like a sheepdog moving through a flock of dirty, very stupid sheep.

a man who discovers his pants are on fire tends to have very little time to worry about somebody else's box of matches.

First I walked into a trap and nearly turned into the Inhuman Torch, and then a man I had regarded as a foot soldier in the war against intelligence turned out to be a covert general—and to top it off, he was apparently in league with the last few living pieces of my nemesis, Sergeant Doakes, and he seemed very likely to take up where Doakes had left off, in the pursuit of poor persecuted Dexter. Where would this end?

I felt as though someone had snuck in and packed my head with beach sand, even including the bottle caps and cigarette butts.

So I wanted to make you a nice French meal," she said. "Coq au vin." She said it with her best Bad French accent, caca van, and a very small lightbulb came on in my head. "Caca van?" I said, and I looked at Astor. She nodded. "Poop van," she said.

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