“It crept into you like mist under an ill-fitting door, until words you didn’t know you knew had taken up residence–words like love, heartbreak, forever. People her age spent years having poetry hammered into them at school, and emerged without a couplet intact. But each and every one knew what followed “I’ll never dance with another.”
— The Last Voice You Hear (Mick Herron)
I love books. Real, paper books. I love the feel of the paper, the weight on my chest, the smell… I purchase books to support the authors and so I can make notes in the margins and underline passages. I only keep the books I might read again and donate the others to local library.
With the recent discovery of some new (to me) authors (Robert Crais, Walter Mosley, Mick Herron, Don Winslow), I was out of room. Stacks of books everywhere. So time for more bookshelves. I can almost hear them sigh.
“He wondered now how many people there were […] living their back-up plan; who were office drones or office cleaners, teachers, plumbers, shop assistants, IT mavens, priests and accountants only because rock and roll, football, movies and authordom hadn’t panned out. And decided that the answer was everyone. Everyone wanted a life less ordinary. And only a tiny minority ever got it, and even they probably didn’t appreciate it much.”
— Slow Horses (Mick Herron)
“Pike was good at waiting, which was why he excelled in the Marines and other things. He could wait for days without moving and without being bored because he did not believe in time. Time was what filled your moments, so if your moments were empty, time had no meaning. Emptiness did not flow or pass; it simply was. Letting himself be empty was like
putting himself in neutral: Pike was.”
— The Last Detective (Robert Crais)