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f04368e
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She didn't know what made him happy, though ... and she couldn't remember him doing any of those things - laughing, smiling or being silly - for quite a while. From some time before Mom left, in fact. Was that why she'd gone? Because he hadn't laughed any more? Would you leave someone because of something like that? Did you have to keep laughing and smiling and seeming happy or else people would leave you?
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Michael Marshall Smith |
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ea13f55
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And so later Hannah was back at the kitchen table in her house. Sitting where she'd sat earlier. Her place. Hannah didn't know that humankind has a deep-set belief in the idea that we create and maintain reality through ritual, that repeated actions are what keep the spheres in alignment. She also didn't know that it doesn't work, and that there are far older, more complex, and much darker designs in motion, ones that override ours as effor..
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Michael Marshall Smith |
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f82acde
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Hell is not a place. It's not a noun, child. It's a verb.
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Michael Marshall Smith |
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81d0b58
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of our jobs are bad jobs, but they're the kind held by people in the background. People who are getting by. People who don't play pool that well.
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Michael Marshall Smith |
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39c2180
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though we all inhabit the same place during the day, at night each one of us is hurled into a several world.
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Michael Marshall Smith |
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87fdec4
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Wherever you go, and whatever you do, the first thing you're going to see in the morning, and the last thing at night, is the inside of your own head. An unchanging landscape, a still photograph.
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Michael Marshall Smith |
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fea58da
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When you're born a light is switched on, a light which shines up through your life. As you get older the light still reaches you, sparkling as it comes up through your memories. And if you're lucky as you travel forward through time, you'll bring the whole of yourself along with you, gathering your skirts and leaving nothing behind, nothing to obscure the light. But if a Bad Thing happens part of you is seared into place, and trapped for ev..
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Michael Marshall Smith |
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63bd87d
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The mind is like a pool of water, and rain falls as you age. The water gets deeper, and looks so still: occasionally some stray thought or impulse betrays its depths, but seldom. But deep down underneath, right at the bottom, there may be something lying on the bottom. Something that died a long time ago, something rotted and foul that belies the pool's still surface. Alkland had just seen a bubble rise from the bottom, had smelt the stench..
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Michael Marshall Smith |
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65fa5b6
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People always find it so frustrating that there's no structure they can see, that they just have to follow the river downstream and see what they find. They want to know the plot so they can guess the end, because they're afraid of what it might be. I can understand that, even though I know it's not the way things work. I never know what the hell's going to happen next, but I can live with that.
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Michael Marshall Smith |
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d8ddaf7
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the kind of beards which make you look like you've glued a racoon to your face. The
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Michael Marshall Smith |
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59fa7c3
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When you let it get personal, the cost becomes personal too. You're opening your own heart here. You sure you want to do that?" "I'd do it for free. For the bullshit you are, and have always been." "Disbelief is easy, Kane. It's faith that takes courage, and character."
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faith
unbelief
disbelief
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Michael Marshall Smith |
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52d1719
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Disbelief is easy, Kane. It's faith that takes courage, and character.
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courage
faith
character
disbelief
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Michael Marshall Smith |
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39566e4
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Some stories, some people, deserve their length and span. They merit a novel-length treatment, have things to tell and other lives to illuminate.
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Michael Marshall Smith |
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5d48958
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Everything you've done, everything you've seen, everything you've become, remains. You never can go back, only forward, and if you don't bring the whole of yourself with you, you'll never see the sun again.
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Michael Marshall Smith |
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dc7b76e
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Everything you do is a one-way street.
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Michael Marshall Smith |
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6999a3f
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The furniture was white and the carpet red - it looked like the inside of someone's mouth. Three
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Michael Marshall Smith |
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77be2ed
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the kind of woman who would breeze into the bathroom while I was shaving and say, "Yo, shithead--you going to fix that shelf like you said, or do I have to take you back to Husbands-R-Us?"
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Michael Marshall Smith |
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b802f38
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three
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Michael Marshall Smith |
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41717c4
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I said this was his story. I didn't say I believed it. I don't. You shouldn't either. That would be best.
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Michael Marshall Smith |
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83046c2
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would be on top of me like a ton of heavy things.
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Michael Marshall Smith |
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2519fa7
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Power that affects nothing is mere vanity.
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Michael Marshall Smith |
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7c3c81f
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Bodies are great, and I wouldn't go anywhere without mine, but sometimes they're so disappointing. If
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Michael Marshall Smith |
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ed63d86
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I hurtled down a path through the middle of a park, past shrubbery so refined it was probably entitled to vote.
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Michael Marshall Smith |
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f8297e2
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You still search for Narnia, even though by then you're too old to believe in it and it doesn't want you there.
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Michael Marshall Smith |
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e0911f2
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we all inhabit the same place during the day, at night each one of us is hurled into a several world. Well,
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Michael Marshall Smith |
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6bea051
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Are you okay?' 'What do you mean?' 'You stopped talking. Just sat there looking intense.' 'Sorry. I had a stretch of interior monologue. Slightly lyrical. Takes a while to get through.
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Michael Marshall Smith |
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71fdbf8
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I cannot remember when I became exhausted instead of merely tired.
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Michael Marshall Smith |
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e8201eb
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Ignorance isn't always bliss. Sometimes it's just a huge pain in the arse,
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Michael Marshall Smith |
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27ad5ea
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It is the aimless who find the wrong roads, and drive down them, simply because they have nowhere else to go.
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Michael Marshall Smith |
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9834aaf
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Growing older, it appears, does not mean growing up.
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Michael Marshall Smith |
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81b2da9
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If a door isn't there then you can't hope to go through it, but if it's there but always locked, then you're trapped. Someone is keeping the door shut.
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Michael Marshall Smith |
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377584e
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Humans and stories need each other.
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Michael Marshall Smith |
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4b26bf4
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And sometimes, when a lot has happened in your life, much of it inexplicable, silence is what you need to say the most.
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Michael Marshall Smith |
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ec69333
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One of life's dreariest truths, my dear, is that something once wonderful can come to seem ... ordinary.
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Michael Marshall Smith |
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e6ea169
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What?' 'Wherever there are good people,' he said, 'there are also bad. The world is heavy. If it doesn't want to follow where you're leading, then in the end the dream will die. What replaces a dream is often thin and dry for a time. People do not show their best sides in such circumstances.
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Michael Marshall Smith |
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f4c93aa
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You can never go back, only forward. I read that in a book once.
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Michael Marshall Smith |
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6d19853
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The Devil waited until he was sure the two policemen were going to keep their side of the bargain. A man called Nietzsche once observed that there is no such thing as moral phenomena, only a moral *interpretation* of them. The Devil had a certain amount of time for Nietzsche. despite the mustache. He'd understood. We look at a squirrel and say it is jumping; but we might as well think about a jump in its essence, and claim that the *jump* i..
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humor
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Michael Marshall Smith |
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c64aad5
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The future is hungry and unkind. It'll gobble you up, little girl. It will eat your heart.
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Michael Marshall Smith |
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1972b46
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Almost every story in the world has a back door through which the Devil can enter if he so chooses.
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Michael Marshall Smith |
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70591a4
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Erik left the church and walked back out through the streets. The people coursing through them did not frighten him any more because he realized their movements and the sound of their thousand voices were notes in a vast piece of music, a story made of sounds, sometimes dissonant - like the shouts of men trying to sell bits of meat, or old, rusty tools - and at others sweet and pure, like mothers fondly calling their children, or greeting t..
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Michael Marshall Smith |
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e3de5f9
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Imagine, if you will, a watchmaker's workshop. In fact, please imagine one whether you wish to or not.
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Michael Marshall Smith |
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b29d7b0
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In your twenties you unquestioningly believe you're writing in pencil, a striking first draft. You do things with such confidence. You know you're so strong, so individual, wholly unique: that you have power over heaven and earth, and that the future and its wonders are either already in your hands or will be after you do the next thing, or the thing that follows naturally after that. And so you bravely pick up the existential pencil and s..
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Michael Marshall Smith |
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ce369c7
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There is no beginning. We are always in the middle.
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Michael Marshall Smith |
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20cd72b
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Parents hear those words more often than anyone, and always from those they love the most. Families are the crucibles that temper the toughest of love's swords. It gets intense in there sometimes. You know you're going to get slapped with those words sooner or later, when the little person in your charge glares hot-eyed up at you and flexes their soul. You'll joke about it with your partner before it happens, how someday this bundle of depe..
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Michael Marshall Smith |