Quotes from Thomas Mullen

Laughing at ourselves is possible when we are able to see humanity as it is - a little lower than the angels and at times only slightly higher than the apes.

Marriage - as its veterans know well - is the continuous process of getting used to things you hadn't expected.

James James Jameson – his real name – who had escaped state prison

The rain grew louder, the gutters talking to the downspouts.

Of the eight, seven had served in the war. Two had medals to show for it, including Smith, awarded a Silver Star for carrying two badly burned fellow soldiers out of a demolished tank and through hostile fire. Six had attended college and four, including Boggs, had diplomas (a graduation rate exponentially higher than the white cops').

You blind, son? You see a 'ma'am' here? I look like a white lady to you?" It had broken his heart. A

the best way to be allowed to do something was to do it with authority and put the onus on someone to stop you.

There were plenty of white folks like that, happy to define themselves as not-quite-as-bad-as-some, conveniently surrounding themselves with awful people in contrast to whom they looked good.

Trying to introduce the concept of law and order to a people who had never been given reason to trust it, and who therefore found justice in blood feuds—they were so much more honorable, and interesting, and, well, bloody—was a terribly long and frustrating process.

Almost makes you wonder if someone was guiding us, strange as that sounds. I feel a swelling in my chest, and I honestly don't know if it's pity or jealousy of her belief that God or her dead brother can reach out and affect her life like that. I take her head in my hands and hold her closer, wondering which of us is lost and which is guiding the other someplace new.

Horace's mother had warned him about white people, that he should never speak to them unless they spoke first, and that if he did, he needed to say "sir" and "ma'am" and not be rude but to get away as quickly as he could beforethey did something terrible. She had refused to say what it was people like this did that was so awful. Horace figured they ate colored people, or at least colored children.

Since the white cops ventured over only when they needed a Negro to conveniently arrest for some crime, the residents had no protection from pickpockets and thieves and burglars, scofflaws and roughnecks, moonshiners and drunks and rapists.

His voice, the very sound of rolling eyes.

The right thing was confusing, and difficult, and sometimes Jason wondered if it was in fact a nonexistent ideal, like heaven or the American dream. There was no right thing. You did what you did for whatever reasons occurred to you at the time, depending on whichever emotion was running thickest in your blood. Your desire and fear and adrenaline and longing. You made your choice and came up with the reasons later.

She had written Darcy the letter and posted it from her husband's tenth-story office while he was away in some strumpet's bed. And then she'd transformed herself into a bird, and then an anvil, and then a corpse.

He even assembled coops for poultry, not unaware of the irony that he was a prisoner building a prison for lesser creatures.

now they were expected to walk with a heavy step and newfound power through their neighborhoods. In every other part of the city, however, they were still expected to vanish, or worse.

Because here was what none of them wanted to admit, Leo thought, the thing they were simply too blind or angry or spoiled to realize: this life was the best it could possibly be.

The characters and events in this book are fictitious. Any similarity to real persons, living or dead, is coincidental and not intended by the author. Past events are described in a fictitious manner, future events are described as they will indeed occur, unless they are disrupted by historical agitators, which is beyond the author's control. For now.

He was in the far too familiar position of being amazed by his own stupidity.

And what a city! The perfect geometric layout, the wide avenues and clean sidewalks, all the monuments bathes in celestial light. The contemps around me hav eno idea how long it will take to rebuild something like this. Do they see the beauty around them? Are they dizzy from the heights on this pinnacle their civilization is teetering upon? No--they troop along, necks crooked into their ancient phones like bent marionettes. Their right cheeks glow.

Because certainty isn't the same as truth. It just means you're really, really deluded.

You're not impressing anyone with the ten-dollar words, Boggs. Fewer adjectives, please. No one's giving you a PhD for this." Since then, Boggs strained to be as succinct as possible so as not to offend his GED-holding boss. As

The first time Negro officers had been needed in a courtroom, the judge had refused to let them enter in uniform, demanding that they enter as "typical nigras." ...Only after much back-channel maneuvering .....after another judge's vouching for their continued "good behavior" ( as if they were dogs whose ability to control their bladders was worthy of compliments), they had recently won a concession: they could now wear their uniforms at trial.