Timothy Hallinan Quotes

She gave me the slow nod women use to indicate that they understand our pain, they admire the courage with which we handle it, and they're absolutely certain that it's all our fault.

The enemy is not the badly written page; it is the empty page the great advantage of a badly written page is that it can be rewritten. It can be improved. A blank page is zero. In fact, it's worse than zero, because it represents territory you're afraid, unwilling, or too lazy to explore. Avoid exploring this territory long enough, and you'll abandon your book.

What was it like, being married to six actresses?"
"Like being married to one of them. They're all pretty much alike."
"Why'd you keep doing it, then?"
"Hope is the thing with feathers," Trent said, "that tickles your scrotum at the moments when you most need a clear head.

Life is a gift. If we don't live it well, we are being ungrateful. And we have to love the ones who journey with us. (A Nail Through the Heart)

I heard what I'd learned against my will to identify as new age music. Aimless and spacey, it meandered from unresolved keyboard chord to unresolved keyboard chord with some somnolent noodling in place of melody. Drooling pianos, music to sleepwalk by.

I let one of the men rename me. A man gave me the name Rose – you didn't know that, did you, Poke?…He said, this man, he said that Kwan was too hard to remember, even though it's a good name and it means 'spirit,' and that the rose was the queen of flowers and I was the queen of Patpong." She laughs, rough as a cough. "The queen of Patpong. A kingdom of whores and viruses. Death with a smile.

And you know women, they're both back there turning it into the crime of the century. Planting it in a little garden in the center of their hearts and watering it with feelings. Talking about it, sharing it. You're a cheat, you're a heartbreaker, you're like a museum exhibit, Everything That's Wrong with Guys.