Michael Montoure Quotes & Sayings

I listen to the grinding whir of the clock, and the creaking of my listing bed, and the sound the phone doesn't make when it's shut off. — Michael Montoure

The only sounds here were lazy, ponderous, gentle sounds. A bee hung low in the warm afternoon haze, and he watched it unafraid, listened to the dull electric razor sound of its wings cutting the air. Birds sang sweet and unseen, and a hundred eyes watched him from the dark. — Michael Montoure

In the dim light of the closed bar, he thought at first it was silver, but as he reached inside and held it up, he saw that it was a gleaming white, so dazzling he knew he had never properly seen the color white before, only paler, inferior shades. — Michael Montoure

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. — Michael Montoure

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. — Michael Montoure

What do you tell someone who hasn't live through it all?

Try to explain what it's like, living under a pressure-front of madness crawling up out of the sea - the fairy folk nearly done with their centuries-long crossing of the Atlantic. Tell him about the watchtowers of the air, brought to earth by fire in New York. Tell him about New Orleans, all its magic and voudoun drawing the Fey like a magnet, the ocean rising up to meet it. By the time they burn like wildfire all across the country to Hollywood, the whole world will be dreaming their dreams. — Michael Montoure

Time falls on us, like rain, it falls like rain until we drown in it, and sometimes, it's like the drains overflow, and time just - pools up, it seeps, it gathers in the corners. — Michael Montoure

The skyscrapers of the city had finished scraping all the sky away, and the clouds overhead were exactly the color of concrete and I was safe and cold in a canyon of glass and steel. — Michael Montoure

There's a line you never get to cross, as long as you live. The edge of your body. You're trapped inside your skin, and no matter how many times you reach out to touch a friend or a lover, no matter how close you hold someone or how fiercely you make love, when it begins, when it ends, and all the moments in between, you are still yourself, alone. I know you knew this. It was in all the love songs you wrote. I think it was the hidden impulse we both had, down inside, that made us take razors to our skin, that desire to open up and let the world in, to let ourselves out, to take that sharp thin line of flesh and erase it. — Michael Montoure

He'd wanted to - he didn't know. Break bottles. Break windows, crash cars. Burn down the world. Find solace at the bottom of countless more bottles of wine, this time consumed in solitude. In the end he did none of these things; while he knew the shapes and forms of rage and grief, he had, in truth, nothing more than gentleness inside to sustain him. — Michael Montoure

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. — Michael Montoure

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. — Michael Montoure

He'd grown unused to woods like this. He'd become accustomed to the Northwest, evergreen and shaded dark. Here he was surrounded by soft leaves, not needles; leaves that carried their deaths secretly inside them, that already heard the whispers of Autumn. Roots and branches that knew things. — Michael Montoure

[...] I'd wake up in the middle of the night to the Star-Spangled Banner and some old film of a flag blowing in the wind, telling you the day was over and it was long past time to go to bed. That was back when days used to end, before CNN and infomercials, before all our days bled right into each other. — Michael Montoure

Why do you have to ruin everything?' he asked. 'Why do you have to name everything? Decide what's real and what's - why can't you just enjoy things? What's wrong with you? — Michael Montoure

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. — Michael Montoure

What's a reputation for, if not for proceeding oneself? — Michael Montoure

Everything laughed. — Michael Montoure

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. — Michael Montoure

I try asking him some more questions, but it's like talking to voice mail. — Michael Montoure

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. — Michael Montoure

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

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