Ben H. Winters Quotes & Sayings

Aren't we all depressed, Detective? Under the weight of all this unbearable immanence? — Ben H. Winters

Now I see things differently. It took me some time, but I know the secret now. Freedman Town serves a good purpose
not for the people who live there, Lord knows; people stuck there by poverty, by prejudice, by laws that keep them from moving or working. Freedman Town's purpose is for the rest of the world. The world that sits, like Martha, with dark glasses on, staring from a distance, scared but safe. Create a pen like that, give people no choice but to live like animals, and then people get to point at them and say 'Will you look at those animals? That's what kind of people those people are.' And that idea drifts up and out of Freedman Town like chimney smoke, black gets to mean poor and poor to mean dangerous and all the words get murked together and become one dark idea, a cloud of smoke, the smokestack fumes drifting like filthy air across the rest of the nation. — Ben H. Winters

Energetic rumormonger who calls himself Dan Dan the Radio Man. — Ben H. Winters

Freedom is a matter of logistics. — Ben H. Winters

It's like a concert with no stage, no bands, no electricity; a concert that's all audience. — Ben H. Winters

The first time we met he shot me in the head with an electric staple gun, but our relationship has evolved in the subsequent months. — Ben H. Winters

and no more real Dunkin' Donuts. — Ben H. Winters

When he says "when it all first started up," he means early summer of last year, when the asteroid entered the public consciousness in a serious way. — Ben H. Winters

See a bald woman in a black pencil skirt and white blouse. — Ben H. Winters

He books it into that little playground there. I mean the guy is zooming like the Road Runner, skidding through the gravel and the slush and everything. I'm yelling, "Police, police! Stop, motherfucker!"

'You do not yell, "Stop, motherfucker."'

'I do. Because you know, Palace, this is it. This is the last chance I get to run after a perp yelling, "Stop, motherfucker. — Ben H. Winters

And Alison's leaning gently on my arm, her wild bouquet of orchid-red curls tickling into my neck. — Ben H. Winters

Never have I know spirits so low they could not be raised by hearing of a Frenchman eaten by a shark! — Ben H. Winters

Beautifully indeed! But she does everything well. Have you seen her peel a banana? It is like listening to a symphony. — Ben H. Winters

It must be that there is something in the hearts of human beings, some natural fluid perhaps, that insists on happiness, even confronted with the most powerful arguments against it. — Ben H. Winters

you can really see it, with an overdose, you can watch the light dripping out of someone's eyes. — Ben H. Winters

He's weeping, his face dissolving in his hands. It's exhausting. People hiding behind the asteroid, like it's an excuse for poor conduct, for miserable and desperate and selfish behavior, everybody ducking in its comet-tail like children in mommy's skirts. — Ben H. Winters

There is an aspect of my character that tends to latch on to one difficult but potentially solvable problem, rather than grapple with the vast and unsolvable problem that would be all I could see, if I were to look up, figuratively speaking, from my small blue notebooks. — Ben H. Winters

my mind slipped out from under me. — Ben H. Winters

There was some little local controversy too, about a fundraising effort called Suzie's Closet--folks getting together in church basements to make care packages for the plantations--blankets and candy bars.....first they interviewed a local advocate for the homeless, asking why our attention shouuld be down there, "when there's so much suffering right here at home."...it was the usual stuff --all the new stories and just the old stories again. — Ben H. Winters

Everybody always wanted to do something, and here come the guys who always wanted to joyride in a city bus. — Ben H. Winters

It is remarkable, when you consider it, all the complicated worlds we construct to avoid anything that might disturb us or cause us pain. The bulwarks and baffles we build up, the moats and the mazes. — Ben H. Winters

She's like a picture of our mother that someone crumpled up and tried to smooth out again. — Ben H. Winters

Solving a murder is not about serving the victim, because the victim is, after all, dead. Solving a murder serves society by restoring the moral order that has been upset by the gunshot or knife strike or poisoning, and it serves to preserve that moral order by warning others that certain acts cannot be committed with impunity. — Ben H. Winters

And the fact is that what Cortez said actually has the ring of truth. Not that kind of girl. But neither was Peter Zell that kind of guy. Nobody is the kind of person they used to be. — Ben H. Winters

The dream that I've been having, about my high-school sweetheart, is not really about my high-school sweetheart, when you get right down to it. It's not a dream about Alison Koechner and our lost love and the precious little three-bedroom house in Maine we might have built together, had things gone a different way. I am not dreaming of white picket fences and Sunday crosswords and warm tea.
There's no asteroid in the dream. In the dream, life continues. Simple life, happy and white-picket lined or otherwise. Mere life. Goes on.
When I'm dreaming of Alison Koechner, what I'm dreaming of is not dying. — Ben H. Winters

I have to wonder if it isn't more accurate to say that life is a series of trap doors, and you fall through them, one by one, tumbling down and down and down, one hole to the next. — Ben H. Winters

Freedman Town serves a good purpose - not for the people who live there, Lord knows; people stuck there by poverty, by prejudice, by laws that keep them from moving or working. Freedman Town's purpose is for the rest of the world. The world that sits, like Martha, with dark glasses on, staring from a distance, scared but safe. Create a pen like that, give people no choice but to live like animals, and then people get to point at them and say 'Will you look at those animals? That's what kind of people those people are'. — Ben H. Winters

She keeps talking, and I keep listening, writing down every word she says, even as some hungry part of my mind flies off into a corner, huddles with this new information - a morphine addict, some kind of opiate, for a period - and begins to chew on it, taste its marrow, decide how it might be digested. Decide if it's true. — Ben H. Winters

You're like a monster, dude'", he says, light amusement coloring his strained voice. "'From a monster movie. The man who would not fucking quit — Ben H. Winters

It's such a fine line with people, whether they're playing dumb or being dumb. — Ben H. Winters

The end of the world changes everything, from a law-enforcement perspective. — Ben H. Winters

We sit like that, giving each other strength, like strangers on a crashing plane. — Ben H. Winters

Sometimes it's possible, just barely possible, to imagine a version of this world different from the existing one, a world in which there is true justice, heroic honesty, a clear perception possessed by each individual about how to treat all the others. Sometimes I swear I could see it, glittering in the pavement, glowing between the words in a stranger's sentence, a green, impossible vision--the world as it was meant to be, like a mist around the world as it is. — Ben H. Winters

Maia, we now know, is going to land in Indonesia. They — Ben H. Winters

A pool of melancholy blooms in my chest and rushes into my body like deep-blue blood. — Ben H. Winters

He looks up at the sound of the gravel crunch on the driveway, and I catch a flash of impression, a reclusive animal surprised in his lair by the arrival of the hunters. — Ben H. Winters

But that's how it works: no matter what the odds of a given event, that one-in-whatever-it-is has to come in at some point, or it wouldn't be a one-in-whatever chance. It would be zero. — Ben H. Winters

I bore silent witness, thinking, There is no army of abolition. This is what the world has for heroes. Ordinary men, squabbling and prideful. Hassling each other, doing their best, busting the world free. And men like me, behind fake papers and clear-glass spectacles, keeping it chained. — Ben H. Winters

She was reserved and cold, as if having been stolen from her native village in a burlap sack and made to be servant and helpmate to an Englishman many years her senior, for some reasons sat poorly with her. — Ben H. Winters

we clasp hands and look at each other as the sky begins to glow, — Ben H. Winters

No action comes divorced from motive, neither in art nor in life. — Ben H. Winters

Sandy leans forward and kisses me, and I kiss her back, pressing myself against her, my excitement about the investigation rolling over, accelerating, transforming into that other big feeling, that exhilarating and terrifying feeling - not love, but the thing that feels like love - bodies rising to each other, nerve endings opening up and seeking each other - a feeling I know, even as it floods into my veins and my joints, that I will probably never feel again. Last time, for this. — Ben H. Winters

Would strap you, hands and feet, to a machine, turn a wheel to make you talk. Or even not to, just to watch you experience it. Or because there was someone visiting the court who had never gotten a chance to see the machine in action. Another one of those things that makes you think, well, okay, the end of the human race, what are you gonna do? — Ben H. Winters

It's like you walk into a dark room, and there's a sliver of pale light under a doorway on the opposite side. You open that door and it leads on to a second room, slightly brighter than the last, and there's another door on the other side, with light under that one. And you keep going forward, one room after the other, more and more rooms, more and more light. — Ben H. Winters

There is little novelty in the detective who cannot solve himself. — Ben H. Winters

No. Skeve is not any kind of terrorist. He's an idiot." "The overlapping Venn-diagram section of those two categories, you will find, can be quite large. — Ben H. Winters

I will never fall in love again. This will be the last time. — Ben H. Winters

Pure uncomplicated summertime. — Ben H. Winters

I did not see the white people, only the black: and as I watched I swore I could see fumes rising from their mouths - fumes rolling out of their mouths like exhaust, and I could see that every black person had the same small cloud of angry smoke coming out of his or her mouth and nose, a haze rolling up off the street like exhaust, filling the air, the white people breathing all that and not knowing it. Someone — Ben H. Winters

I am a question mark aimed at an answer. — Ben H. Winters

Lady Middleton piqued herself upon the elegance and extravagance of her table, and all her domestic arrangements; she loved to surprise English visitors with displays of hospitality native to her homeland, such as flavouring her soups with monkey urine and not telling anyone she had done so until the bowl had been drained. — Ben H. Winters

It's maddening; he's like an obnoxious seven-year-old that someone has installed at the helm of a vast international conspiracy. — Ben H. Winters

Respectfully, sir, the asteroid did not make you leave her. The asteroid is not making anyone do anything. It's just a big piece of rock floating through space. Anything anyone does remains their own decision. — Ben H. Winters

The same darkness, with new shadows in it. — Ben H. Winters

And then I roll out, just after midnight on October 3, with that one particular memory, of me and Naomi at Mr. Chow's, threaded through my ribs like a red ribbon. It — Ben H. Winters

Because a promise is a promise, Officer Cavatone, and civilization is just a bunch of promises, that's all it is. A mortgage, a wedding vow, a promise to obey the law, a pledge to enforce it. And now the world is falling apart, the whole rickety world, and every broken promise is a small rock tossed at the wooden side of its tumbling form. — Ben H. Winters

I am a question mark pointed at a secret, Cortez is a tool aimed at the stubborn places of the world. — Ben H. Winters

I'm not a slave, man. I just gotta sign out, say where I'm going, what time I'll be back and then I gotta sign back in. — Ben H. Winters

Then he's got one shelf where all the personal stuff sits, as if quarantined, — Ben H. Winters

An investigation's proper course cannot be mapped in advance. It follows each piece of information forward to the next one. — Ben H. Winters

You want to pray to someone, pray to Bruce Willis in Armageddon. — Ben H. Winters

I can't solve the crime unless I know everything and the world can't end with the crime unsolved, that's all there is to it, so I tighten my grip on her shoulders and demand that she remember. — Ben H. Winters

Still I feel a rush of gladness from being done with that bunker, that crypt. I burst up into the aboveground, drinking air and daylight like a surfacing diver. I — Ben H. Winters

Vengeance is the cheapest of motivations, it's a tin star on a shabby coat. I want answers is all that I want. — Ben H. Winters

He laughs like, what can you do? Laughs and spreads his palms as if revealing himself, Cortez the thief, as he is and always was, the person I always knew was there but never wanted to see. I am surprised, but why am I surprised? I decided at some point that he had made my road his road, given over to me the last two months of preimpact existence, because I was on my cockamamie hero's quest and required an able and agile sidekick - I reached that conclusion without thinking about it much and put the question aside. But everybody does everything for a reason. That's lesson number one of police work; it's lesson number one of life. — Ben H. Winters

Still, the conscientious detective is obliged to examine the question of motive in a new light, to place it within the matrix of our present unusual circumstance. — Ben H. Winters

OPEC stopped exporting oil in early November, the Canadians followed suit a couple of weeks later, and that was it. The Department of Energy opened the Strategic Petroleum Reserve on January 15, along with strictly enforced price controls, and everybody had gas for about nine days, and then they didn't anymore. — Ben H. Winters

Every choice forecloses on other choices; each step forward leaves a thousand dead possible universes behind you. — Ben H. Winters

What is about to happen is not the reclaiming of Earth by a triumphant Mother Nature, a karmic repudiation of humanity's arrogant ill stewardship. Nothing we ever did mattered one way or another. This event has always been in the cards for man's planet, for the whole scope of our history, coming regardless of what we did or didn't do. — Ben H. Winters

Walking the blood means walking with the escaping suspect or the fleeing victim, it means you find the trail and see what songs it wants to sing you. — Ben H. Winters

This then will be the shape and the feel of the world: an abandoned shell, signs of old life, curious animals wandering in and out of ruins, the wilderness crowding in, overtaking all human structures and human things. — Ben H. Winters

I don't know." I shake my head slowly, look out the window at the parking lot, lift my cup of coffee for one final sip. "I feel like I wasn't made for these times." "I don't know, kid," she says. "I think maybe you're the only person who was. — Ben H. Winters

The perseverance in this world, despite it all, of things done right. — Ben H. Winters

One does not contemplate failure, or even death, when one believes oneself to be on a crusade. — Ben H. Winters

Almost always, things are exactly as they appear. People are continually looking at the painful or boring parts of life with the half-hidden expectation that there is more going on beneath the surface, some deeper meaning that will eventually be unveiled; we're waiting for the saving grace, the shocking reveal. But almost always things just are what they are, almost always there's no glittering one hidden under the dirt. — Ben H. Winters

But the area where Father Barton had taken out two hundred bucks on Sunday afternoon - there was some pigmentation down there, no question about it. — Ben H. Winters

4. People talk about the asteroid that killed the dinosaurs, like it just happened one day. All the dinosaurs were hanging out, all together in an open field, and the asteroid slammed down and destroyed them, killed them all and all at once. Not so, of course. Some died on the day, no doubt about it, and probably a lot - but the whole business took years. Generations, maybe. They can't say for sure. They know that a ten-kilometer — Ben H. Winters

Almost always things just are what they are, almost always there's no glittering ore hidden under the dirt. — Ben H. Winters

Because as any writer will tell you, an IDEA for a book is like falling in love, it's all wild emotion and headlong rush, but the ACTUAL ACT of writing a book is like building a relationship: it is joyous, slow, fragile, frustrating, exhilarating, painstaking, exhausting, worth it. — Ben H. Winters

Lip. I have a sudden vivid picture of the earth as flat, a tray, covered in marbles, and someone is tilting it, and the marbles are rolling, cascading, from east to west. — Ben H. Winters

They'd been improving the machinery of slavery for two centuries, inventing new tortures to make people work harder and longer. Stripping slaves of their names, their families, their spirits. This is where it went next: people with no bloodline, people with no past and no future, people with no claim to freedom. — Ben H. Winters

[...] no slaves down here, all that abstraction torn away like skin coming off a body, and these were people -- human fucking beings, each with the one life he was given, and this was the life they had. — Ben H. Winters

What she was doing was, she was letting it be his idea. She was walking him along, holding his hand tightly enough to lead him, loosely enough for him to be unaware of it. She was an absolute natural. Or maybe all women could do that to all men, if they wanted to. — Ben H. Winters

You know what I'm doing right now?" I say, watching the muddy liquid rush toward the edge of the table. "I'm thinking: Oh no! The coffee's going to spill onto the floor! I'm so worried! Let's keep talking about it!" And then the coffee waterfalls over the side of the desk, splashing on Andreas's shoes and pooling on the ground beneath the desk. "Oh, look at that," I say. "It happened anyway." * — Ben H. Winters

What the slave wants but can never have is not only freedom from the chains but also from their memory. — Ben H. Winters

It is a strange kind of fire, the fire of self-righteousness, which gives us such pleasure by its warmth but does so little to banish the darkness. — Ben H. Winters

People's inability to face up to this thing is worse than the thing, it really is. — Ben H. Winters

Such an evening I ran away as soon as I could, but not before I had seen Marianne's sweet face as white as death. That was the last, last look I ever had of her - the last manner in which she appeared to me. It was a horrid sight? Among many horrid sights from that evening, it was the most horrid of all! Yet when I thought of her to-day as really dying - of malaria, and yellow fever, and lupus-"
"No, not lupus."
"Really? Well, that's good. — Ben H. Winters

And surely some large proportion of the world's current danger and decline is not inevitable but rather the result of people scrambling fearfully away from the things that have long made sense. — Ben H. Winters

When I'm dreaming of Alison Koechner, what I'm dreaming of is not dying. Okay? See? I get it. — Ben H. Winters