Michael Marshall Quotes

what people write reflects what they believe - fiction is where you go to tell or read the truth that people will stare or laugh at you for expressing in real life.

Surely there was nothing more pathetic than screwing up your own suicide.

We're so used to being edited, so infected with the sleight of hand of the media, that we're more aware of what's been added than of what has been taken away.

The body protects itself, and the same happens in the mind. It occurs sluggishly and imperfectly, a bad job done by indifferent craftsmen, but within minutes an accretion of defence mechanisms starts to form around the trauma, blunting its edges, eventually sealing it away inside scar tissue. Like a sliver of glass buried deep in a cut, the event will never go away, and often a movement will cause it to nudge a nerve ending and burn like fire for a while. However much it hurts when that happens, the last thing you want.

The cause of that happiness was gone, of course, dead and gone, but still we put our faith in places. We think that if we just lived somewhere different, everything would be okay. We believe that if we paint the stairway a bright new colour, and clear out the closets, our minds will follow. We'll take just about any ray of hope rather than accept that ninety-five per cent of the world we inhabit exists within the confines of our own skulls.

You get up, you go to work, you come home, you eat food that's very similar to what you had yesterday or last week, you sit in front of the shows you always watch, and finally you go to the same old bed.

Love is not a charm that pops into the world from a better place to bless two individuals before flitting back home, leaving the couple broken back in two parts and forlorn but fundamentally unchanged. Love is a fire that burns in the soul, sometimes for good, sometimes just for now, sometimes hot enough to scorch and sometimes with a low and sustainable glow. Either way, it leaves the original constituents permanently altered. After the fact everything is different - not just the relationship, but the people involved.

I don't find it surprising that super-old people are so odd and grumpy. Half their friends are dead, they feel like shit most of the time, and the next major event in their lives is going to be their last. They

If we were all the same species, there was little hope for us; that nothing we ever did in the daytime would bleach out what some of us were capable of at night.

The food chain has victims at both ends: even rapists and murderers need someone to look down on, and kid killers will do nicely.

We search for fault because it let's God off the hook, and without Him we don 't know where to turn.