Quotes by Michael Marshall Smith

How many times have you tried to talk to someone about something that matters to you, tried to get them to see it the way you do? And how many of those times have ended with you feeling bitter, resenting them for making you feel like your pain doesnt have any substance after all?Like when youve split up with someone, and you try to communicate the way you feel, because you need to say the words, need to feel that somebody understands just how pissed off and frightened you feel. The problem is, they never do. Plenty more fish in the sea, theyll say, or Youre better off without them, or Do you want some of these potato chips? They never really understand, because they havent been there, every day, every hour. They dont know the way things have been, the way that its made you, the way it has structured your world. Theyll never realise that someone who makes you feel bad may be the person you need most in the world. They dont understand the history, the background, dont know the pillars of memory that hold you up. Ultimately, they dont know you well enough, and they never can. Everyones alone in their world, because everybodys life is different. You can send people letters, and show them photos, but they can never come to visit where you live.Unless you love them. And then they can burn it down.

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.

Disbelief is easy, Kane. It’s faith that takes courage, and character.

Is she dead? called Zenda.Sort of, I shouted, And the pizzas completely fucked too.

I once met a woman whod been in therapy... and it seemed like the big thing shed learned was to ignore everything she thought in the first hour of the day. Thats when the negative stuff will try to bring you down, she said, and she was right about that but not much else. You come back from the night with your head and your soul empty, and bad things try to fill you up. Theres a lot to get exercised about, if you let it. But if youve got a task, something to fill your head and move your limbs, by the time youve finished it the day has begun ands youre onto the next thing. Youre over the hump, like I said.

I shut my eyes, turned away for a moment, and it came: a shiver of finality like the one when you decide, in your own mind, that you’re going to have to tell someone who loves you that you don’t want to be with them anymore. Terror, and relief; relief and terror, so intermingled that they feel like the same thought.

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?

There are times when life seems like a struggle where the only reward you get for hanging on is the chance to struggle some more.

Cross-legged on the floor, you drink, hoping each mouthful will hurt; occasional flurries of spastic movement as you try to work out what to do with your hands. When everyone else is gone, your world is just a tiny box with the walls pressing in. Messages on the phone you cant bear to play, much less listen to, and nothing in the apartment that you can recognize as meaningfully yours.

Hey presto: time travel. You dont need a time machine, it turns out, you just need a friend to laugh like a teenager. Chronology shivers.

I caught one last glimpse of her face, howling something at me.There were too many vowels in what she said, and they were in an unkind order. (Substitutions)

and only when that happens do you realise just how much silence there really is. Silence between lovers, when something really needs to be said; silence from a parent when a child needs some word more than anything else in the world; silences and in betweens and everything which isn’t an answer.

I guess, like some guy once said, if triangles invented a god, the chances are high it would have three sides.

Storyboarded by the West Coast’s finest, the ceiling celebrated the exploits of that most durable of action heroes—God.

You have to accept gifts occasionally, because there are some things you can’t give yourself

You love because you want to need someone the way you did when you were a child, and have them need you too. You eat well because the intensity of taste reminds you of a need satisfied, a pain relieved. The finest paintings are nothing more than the red head of a flower, nodding in the breeze, when you were two years old; the most exciting film is just the way everything was, back in the days when you stared goggle-eyed at the whirling chaos all around you. All these things do is get the adult to shut up for a while, to open for just a moment a tiny sliding window in the cell deep inside, letting the pallid child peep hungrily out and drink the world in before darkness falls again.

I wash with the can of water I set aside the night before, and eat whatever I put next to it. The washing is not strictly necessary but, again, I have always found it a good way to greet the day. You wash after a period of work, after all, and what else is a night of sleep, if not work, or a journey at least? (The Things He Said)

When youre 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 youre lucky as you travel forward through time, youll 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 ever at that time. The rest of you moves onward, dealing with all the todays and tomorrows, but something, some part of you, is left behind. That part blocks the light, colours the rest of your life, but worse than that, its alive. Trapped for ever at that moment, and alone in the dark, that part of you is still alive.

When you’re a child the world forbears you, allows you your flights of imagination, your feelings of specialness. But sooner or later the privileges are withdrawn, and all you’re left with is a stunned bitterness at the realisation that you’re just the same as everybody else.