Thomas Mullen Quotes & Sayings

I'm hopeful that people don't give up on marriage. When it works, it's a gift from God because you can't always have it work out the way you want. — Thomas Mullen

Because here was what none of them wanted to admit, Leo thought, the thing they were simply too blind or angry or spoiled to realize: this life was the best it could possibly be. — Thomas Mullen

Marriage - as its veterans know well - is the continuous process of getting used to things you hadn't expected. — Thomas Mullen

The characters and events in this book are fictitious. Any similarity to real persons, living or dead, is coincidental and not intended by the author. Past events are described in a fictitious manner, future events are described as they will indeed occur, unless they are disrupted by historical agitators, which is beyond the author's control. For now. — Thomas Mullen

Laughing at ourselves is possible when we are able to see humanity as it is - a little lower than the angels and at times only slightly higher than the apes. — Thomas Mullen

Maybe you could drive yourself crazy trying to chart backward all the causes and effects, all the ends and means, tracing everything to some original sin that may or may not have actually occurred but that people accepted as true, or true enough. Maybe staring into the eyes of all that history was a dangerous thing to do, as her mother had calmly warned her. Maybe you were supposed to move forward armed with just enough history to help you figure out the present without obsessing over the past. But how much was enough? Where was the gray area between ignorance and obsession? — Thomas Mullen

The right thing was confusing, and difficult, and sometimes Jason wondered if it was in fact a nonexistent ideal, like heaven or the American dream. There was no right thing. You did what you did for whatever reasons occurred to you at the time, depending on whichever emotion was running thickest in your blood. Your desire and fear and adrenaline and longing. You made your choice and came up with the reasons later. — Thomas Mullen

Since the white cops ventured over only when they needed a Negro to conveniently arrest for some crime, the residents had no protection from pickpockets and thieves and burglars, scofflaws and roughnecks, moonshiners and drunks and rapists. — Thomas Mullen

His voice, the very sound of rolling eyes. — Thomas Mullen

Another time he felt himself reenacting a conversation with father, a long talk about duty and honor and all the reasons why enlisting was the right thing to do. It was a talk they'd had several months ago, and Frank had agreed with everything his father had said, only this time Frank found himself taking a contrary opinion. What the hell's so honorable about it? Duty to whom? To myself, or the guys who would be fighting without me, or to the people here at home afraid of the Hun? Or duty to President Wilson, or to Carnegie, or to God, or to all the fallen soldiers before me, to Great-grandad Emmett and his bleached bones down at Antietam? — Thomas Mullen

She had written Darcy the letter and posted it from her husband's tenth-story office while he was away in some strumpet's bed. And then she'd transformed herself into a bird, and then an anvil, and then a corpse. — Thomas Mullen

now they were expected to walk with a heavy step and newfound power through their neighborhoods. In every other part of the city, however, they were still expected to vanish, or worse. — Thomas Mullen