Michael Montoure Quotes

Fell?' he asked. 'Or was pushed?'

Anton shrugged again. 'It hardly makes a difference,' he said, 'when you are the man at the bottom of the stairs.

He found, using fifty stones to keep track, that he could easily remember the names of all fifty states, and he knew the capitols of a lot of them. He knew his times tables all the way up to twelves, and he knew when they'd signed the Declaration of Independence and when John Glenn landed on the moon.

But he was keenly aware that he didn't know how to tell if nuts were good to eat, or what berries will make you sick, or what mushrooms were poisonous, and he slowly began to wonder why not one person had ever taught him anything useful.

Keep in mind that in the whole long tradition of storytelling, from Greek myths through Shakespeare through King Arthur and Robin Hood, this whole notion that you can't tell stories about certain characters because someone else owns them is a very modern one - and to my mind, a very strange one.

We used to make gods, and we used to make sacrifices to them, and they would reward us. We're still doing it and we still makes the sacrifices - I don't know how many cows die every year to keep Burger Clown alive, but I know it's a lot - but we don't know what to do with the gods once we have them.

He took me down and out into the afterlife of the brightly lit streets, a haze of rain around each streetlight like a galaxy, the whole street a universe spread out like a banquet.

The old house had a thousand doors in it.

All old houses do. You can see them if you know how to look: the noontime shadow of a windowpane crawling with intent across a floor; unmeasured angles of wall meeting wall; fireplaces grown chill with unused years. Archways with unseen contours you can trace with a finger in the cracks as brick grinds against brick in settling walls. Some nights, and some houses are doorways entire, silhouettes against the evening's last light black on black like an opening into a darker sky. You just have to look. An eye-corner glance will do, if you don't turn and stare and explain it away.

Life went back to normal, after that, as it will do if you're not careful.

The broken centerline of the road in her headlights just an endless pulsing ribbon.

They play strange games, games I don't recognize. They pull buttons off their clothes and exchange them back and forth, palming and concealing them and guessing which hands they're held in. Or they arrange themselves in a strange spiral pattern, marching in a loop that folds back on itself, while someone standing outside it taps people out, seemingly at random.

Everything laughed.