When they’d first come out in the morning, a single flounder lay flapping and puffing in the breezeway, one sad, swollen eye looking back toward the sea.

My blessings outweight my regrets

People surprise you sometimes.

The world didn’t give a shit. It didn’t bestow. It took

Brendan knew about the truth. In most cases, it was just a matter of deciding whether you wanted to look it in the face or live with the comfort of ignorance and lies. And ignorance...

What’s your name?””Emma Gould,” she said. “What’s yours?””Wanted.””By all the girls or just the law?

Joe closed his hand over the watch and it was still warm from his father’s pocket, ticking against his palm like a heart.

Maybe honor was in its twilight. Maybe it had always been heading that way. Or worse, maybe it had always been an illusion.

I go on the presumption that everyone’s full of shit until proven otherwise, and this usually serves me in good stead.

Life isn’t happily ever after & golden sunsets & shit like that. It’s work. The person you love is rarely worthy of how big your love is. Because no one is worthy of that &...

Growing up, Joe had adored his brother, Then he’d come to hate him. Now, he mostly didn’t think about him. When he did, he had to admit, he missed his laugh.

Joe knew what the nod meant-this was why they became outlaws. To live moments the insurance salesman of the world, the truck drivers, and lawyers and bank tellers and carpenters and realtors would never know....

There are so many more important things to worry about than how you’re perceived by strangers.

She blew a stream of smoke up at the empty clotheslines. ‘These silly dreams you have when you’re young. I mean, what, Katie and Brendan Harris were going ot make a life in Las Vegas?...

Jesus, Dolores, you’ve got to get yourself together. You’ve got responsibilities. Think about those sometimes – okay? – and get your fucking head right.”Those were the last words his wife heard from him. He’d closed...

Sympathy’s easy. You have sympathy for starving children swatting at flies on the late-night commercials. Sympathy is easy because it comes from a position of power. Empathy is getting down on your knees and looking...

He’d never wanted kids. Outside of priority boarding on an airline, he couldn’t see the upside to them. They took over your life and filled you with terror and weariness and people acted like having...

It’s hard to close the door on optimistic expectations when you love someone.

Happiness doesn’t lie in conspicuous consumption and the relentless amassing of useless crap. Happiness lies in the person sitting beside you and your ability to talk to them. Happiness is clear-headed human interaction and empathy....

Luther had passed many a white church in his day, heard them singing their hymns and chanting their “Amens” and seen them gather on a porch or two afterward with their lemonade and piety, but...

It occurred to him that thinking like this could explain why, even after all the jobs he’d pulled, he rarely had much money in his pockets. Sometimes it seemed like he stole money from one...

Danny could see it in their faces when they shook Steve’s hand—they’d have preferred him dead. Death allowed for the illusion of heroism. The maimed turned that illusion into an uncomfortable odor.

Choice, I’ve always believed, is all that separates us from animals.

And often the worst thing wasn’t the victims–they were dead, after all, and beyond any more pain. The worst thing was those who loved them and survived them. Often the walking dead from now on,...

Patrick Kenzie asking a bemused waitress for a newspaper in smalltown USA. ‘It’s like a homepage without a scroll button?

Do you know the primary difference between men and gods? … Gods don’t think they can become men

But Curtis had come to the table with something they’d never expected, something they would have thought outmoded and out-lived in the modern age: a kind of fundamental righteousness that only the fundamental possessed. Unfettered...

Oh, stop overanalyzing it.

I believe in God. Maybe not the Catholic God or even the Christian one because I have a hard time seeing any God as elitist. I also have a hard time believing that anything that...

When a woman once asked Joe how he could come from such a magnificent home and such a good family and still become a gangster, Joe’s answer was two-pronged: (a) he wasn’t a gangster, he...

Men. If you give them half a chance, they’ll fuck you over just to prove they can.

Fish,” Chuck said and let loose a bright bark of a laugh.

Dave watched him standing up at the bar, chatting with one of the old dockworkers as he waited for his drinks, Dave thinking the guys in here knew what it was to be men. Men...

That’s the thing about being a victim; you start to think it’ll happen to you on a regular basis. It’s living with the reality of your own vulnerability, and it sucks.

Lately, though, he’d just been tired in general. Tired of people. Tired of books and TV and the nightly news and songs on the radio he’d heard years before and hadn’t liked much in the...

I think if a man beats you and fucks half the women he sees and no one will help you, axing him isn’t the least understandable thing you can do.

.. he’d never believed that power, in any shape or form, was anything more than the intemperate protrusion on the egomaniacal heart. Since all egomaniacs were insecure to their frightened cores, they this weilded “power”...

Got us a full moon too coming tomorrow night. Just make things a whole lot worse. All we need.- Why is that?- What’s that, Marshal?- The full moon. You think it makes people crazy?- I...

You, you buy into all this stuff about good guys and bad guys in the world. A loan shark breaks a guy’s leg for not paying his debt, a banker throws a guy out of...

He wanted to go on for hours. He wanted someone to listen to him and to understand that speech wasn’t just about communicating ideas or opinions. Sometimes, it was about trying to convey whole human...

As they’ve always been. And they don’t change just because you want them to.

Happiness made Marv anxious because he knew it didn’t last. But happiness destroyed was worth wrapping your arms around because it always hugged you back.

Jesus.

All the stuff our fathers took for granted as long as you worked hard, the great safety net and the fair wage and the gold watch at the end of it all? That’s all gone...

Vanity is a weakness. I know this. It’s a shallow dependence on the exterior self, on how one looks instead of what one is.

The sound of her breathing reminded me, as it so often did, of how vulnerable she was. And how vulnerable we were because of how much we loved her. The fear – that something could...