Dan Vyleta > Quotes

“It takes me a while to drag him out, he's got himself stuck to the axle, and by the time I am done and stand over the body something strange has started to happen. The alley's filled with a half-dozen cats, runty little things with their ribs showing and their tails worn high like they're pointing to the moon. I stand there, breathing froth into the snowflakes and watch them gather round me, soft kitty paws, and now and then a patrol car rolls past in the distance. The cats are circling us, tails cocked at the moon, their muzzles bloodied by the tail lights' glow. They are vicious bastards, let me tell you: frost on their whiskers, eyes like cut glass, a half-dozen pairs, on me and the dead man. And then they start licking. Licking at the snow I mean, the blood in the snow, they lap it up like mother's milk. And all the while from their throats, from their whole bodies, there issues this sound, you hear it with your skin, it's like an engine running under your palm. That's when I realize they are purring, man, purring as they feed on the midget's death.”
― Dan Vyleta, Pavel & I

“For a minute and more after this announcement, Thomas goes deaf. It's a funny sort of deaf: his ears work just fine but the words he hears do not reach his brain, not in the normal manner where they are sifted for significance and given a place in the hierarchy of meaning. Now they just accumulate.”
― Dan Vyleta, Smoke

“For what after all is Smoke? Yearning. Courage. Anger. The type of fear that coils itself into a fist. Defiance. Triumph. Hope. It’s the animal part of us that will not serve.”
― Dan Vyleta, Smoke

“...the blue-black mark that crawls out of the crater of his wound and insinuates itself onto his cheek.”
― Dan Vyleta, Smoke

“He cannot spit, it seems, without her presence being written in the bile.”
― Dan Vyleta, Smoke

“It’s a choreography of sorts: some birds, her mother once told her, dance before they mate.”
― Dan Vyleta, Smoke

“The dog appears to be sleeping, dreaming; sweeps its tail across the floor in jerky crescents...”
― Dan Vyleta, Smoke

“It is disturbing what money will buy you, Charlie thinks, discretion and resentment both paid for with the same coin.”
― Dan Vyleta, Smoke

“But hi stomach is a knot. No, not his stomach. His entrails, from colon to diaphragm. A knot. It will take hours to unpick.”
― Dan Vyleta, Smoke

“...a light passes the door. It slides through the crack like an inverted shadow, licks a yard of floorboard, and is gone.”
― Dan Vyleta, Smoke