Gregory Ashe > Quotes

“With a soft, pained laugh, Somers kissed him back and then pulled away. “This is it, right?” “What?” “Love. This is what it feels like.” “This is it.”
― Gregory Ashe, Reasonable Doubt

“I know it’s wrong,” Somers said with a sigh. “I know it shouldn’t be so hot. The whole bad-boy-robot-serial-killer thing you do sometimes. It shouldn’t be such a fucking turn-on.”
Hazard cocked his head. “I don’t see why not. Evolutionarily speaking, we’re programmed to respond to evidence of high achievement in potential sexual partners, in hopes of passing those traits to our offspring.”
“That’s right,” Somers said, reaching down to adjust himself and grinning as they pulled into the broken asphalt lot of Slick’s. “Talk dirty to me.”
― Gregory Ashe, Police Brutality

“I’m evaluating inconsistencies and presenting them as part of an analysis of my own unreliable interpretation of last night.”
“It’s like poetry when you talk. Some guys probably want to hear about roses and throbbing, uh, parts, but give me a nice evaluation of inconsistencies and analysis of unreliable narratives.”
― Gregory Ashe, Police Brutality

“John-Henry Somerset was beautiful, the kind of beautiful that hit like a shotgun to the back of the head and didn’t leave any brains or blood behind, the kind of beautiful that left Hazard thoughtless and speechless and, damn it, motionless.”
― Gregory Ashe, Transposition

“It was never the same thing twice, whatever it was. It touched you, and your skin tightened, and your breath sharpened, and something inside, something that might be the soul, caught fire and flared for an instant. And then it went out, and the world was back at arm’s length.”
― Gregory Ashe, The Same Breath

“Hearing about what happened to you, seeing what Dallin lives with, and knowing that nothing means anything, that we’re just trapped on this rock hurtling through a cosmic abyss, and all we do is make more suffering for each other—it’s hard. It’s so hard sometimes I can’t breathe.”
― Gregory Ashe, The Same Breath

“You managed to turn a police interview into an episode of the gay Bachelor.”
― Gregory Ashe, Declination

“It was like the universe was trying to write both of them into a really bad porno.”
― Gregory Ashe, Triangulation

“Blue stragglers are brighter, younger than they should be. Astronomers determine it a bunch of different ways, but these stars stand out because they’re anomalies. Do you know why they’re younger than they should be?” “They formed later than other stars.” “That’s a good guess, but there’s not much evidence for it. There are a lot of answers, actually, but only one that seems to have enough evidence to hold up: they feed on other stars. They’ve got all sorts of fanciful names for them. Cannibal stars. Vampire stars. But they’re pretty sure that’s what’s going on. They’re often binary stars, which means they’re part of a pair, and they steal fuel from their companion star.”
― Gregory Ashe, Police Brutality

“If Holmes heard me, though, he gave no sign of it. He struggled with the next words. “Like a friendship, when sharing electrons in this way, both atoms become more stable. Their bond is more stable. It’s stronger than an ionic bond. They continue to share electrons, in the same way that people must continue to share experiences, emotions, and intimacy. They require ongoing effort and investment. Covalent bonds are often found in molecules; they allow individual atoms to become more than what they would be on their own.”
― Gregory Ashe, The Old Wheel

“Is every man in my life a fucking moron?”
― Gregory Ashe, Triangulation

“People couldn’t forget, not the really awful things. They carried the past with them, sharpened it like a knife, and when you weren’t looking, when you least suspected it, they cut your heart out.”
― Gregory Ashe, Pretty Pretty Boys

“You know how you told me that everything ends?” Jem said quietly. “How death is what gives life meaning, and how our anxiety over death, our fear of it, propels us to live life truly and authentically? How everything has to have an end, and how looking into the face of that reality is so terrifying that most people will choose something safer, something easier, rather than coexist with their fear?”
― Gregory Ashe, The Same End

“Living sucks sometimes, but it’s pretty fucking punk to wake up every day, in spite of what’s ahead of me.”
― Gregory Ashe, A Friend in the Fire

“I think people who read novels are fantasists in desperate need of emotional dope to anesthetize them against the reality of their meaningless existence.”
― Gregory Ashe, The Keeper of Bees

“Leonard Bint, a frequent guest of the Wahredua PD for public intoxication, public urination, public nudity, and poaching.” “And those is my good qualities,”
― Gregory Ashe, Pretty Pretty Boys

“I’m not a heathen. That’s a Christian-centric term, anyway. I’m an agnostic, but only because it’s slightly more intellectually sound than atheism.”
― Gregory Ashe, Relative Justice

“Maybe I had trouble sleeping some nights, but everybody had trouble sleeping sometimes. Maybe, some nights, I had to get up and walk. Maybe I had to sit in the shower sometimes, the water so hot it left my skin pink and shiny, so I could breathe. Maybe I had to run every day. But those things were normal. Everybody had stuff like that. That was just how everybody felt, some days. And that thing at the back of my head, it wasn’t even that big. Most days, it wasn’t even that black. More like gray. More like this gray smudge, and nobody noticed a smudge, not a little one like that when everything else was great. And it was. Everything was perfect.”
― Gregory Ashe, The Mortal Sleep

“Everybody has patterns. Habits. Things that make life easier because we don’t have to decide everything; if we follow a routine or a pattern, a lot of things are already decided, and then our brains can do other things.”
― Gregory Ashe, Triangulation

“Cassella, still smiling, still holding Somers’s hand—still, and what did he think it was, the motherfucking Olympics of handshaking?—”
― Gregory Ashe, Guilt by Association

“Love was about navigating the black spaces of the universe. Love was a lighthouse at the edge of the world. Love—a smile crossed my face as I remembered months before, how simple it had been, how hard, trying to understand my power.

Love was a bridge.”
― Gregory Ashe, The Mortal Sleep

“Still a statue. Still perfect and beautiful. A frozen moment. Or as close to a dream as you could make for yourself in reality. Maybe that’s what this was, what they had—what it felt like, anyway, in that instant, the steel of the sky reflected in the glass. The thought swung wide inside Hazard, a dark opening to fall through.”
― Gregory Ashe, Domestic Animals

“Most people dealing with PTSD find some way of numbing themselves: drugs, alcohol, sexual excess—” “Let’s hear more about that one,” Somers murmured into Hazard’s shoulder. Hazard pinched the inside of Somers’s thigh, and Somers yelped. “—while other people depersonalize and dissociate. They often describe it as feeling dead inside, unable to connect with other people, unable to experience pleasure or love or affection, even with the ones who are closest to them.”
― Gregory Ashe, The Keeper of Bees

“His body was too heavy for him; its own, particular gravity felt like it would drag him to the ground. How many times? How many times could he do this, feel this way, like something had been carved out of him and left a gaping hole of raw nerves? How did everyone else do this, day after day, grappling with the fear that today might be the day that what you loved most in the world could be ripped away from you, that you couldn’t stop it or save it, that—in fact—what you loved most might be responsible for its own destruction? Christ, how did anyone ever take a full breath again after they had a child?”
― Gregory Ashe, Father Complex

“Love is a golden collar. Love takes you prisoner. Love drags you through the mud, skins your hands and knees, and throws you naked, helpless, to the wolves. And you can’t run from it, you can’t deny it, any more than you can run from yourself, deny yourself.”
― Gregory Ashe, Paternity Case

“I might be stupid,” I gritted out, forcing the coffin nail into the creature. “And I might be selfish. I might be royally fucked up. And I am certainly the world’s worst boyfriend. But do you know what my superpower is?” I thrust again with the nail. And again. Every time the iron went home, the fifolet shrieked. It was as clear as water now, with only glimmers of light to suggest my face or shape. The hand on my arm had dissolved. I kept stabbing with the iron as I spoke, my voice rising into a scream. “My superpower, motherfucker, is that I really don’t like myself.”
― Gregory Ashe, Cascade Hunger

“He’s got the right idea. We need more doors in our house.” “I know you’re joking, but doors are actually the seventh-most common cause of trapped negative energy”
― Gregory Ashe, Codirection

“It was my first try; I’ve never had to provide emotional support to someone committing a misdemeanor before.”
“You’ll get better.”
“Gosh, I really hope not.”
― Gregory Ashe, The Same End

“When he came, a corona of light haloed him, and I thought about how forest fires cleared deadwood to make room to grow, and certain pinecones opened only under tremendous heat. How life began with fire.”
― Gregory Ashe, The Whole World Tinder

“Hazard felt a prickle of discomfort, the sense of alienation that reminded him he didn’t see the world the same way as everyone else. He felt it less around Somers”
― Gregory Ashe, Police Brutality