Scott William Carter > Quotes

“If you’re going to talk to him,” she said, “you should at least have me tag along.” “Hmm. In this case, I think it might be better if I didn’t have a cop with me.” She sighed. “Fine. Just promise me you’re not going to get yourself killed, okay?” “Cross my heart and hope to die,” I said. “Not funny. Seriously, this guy isn’t like the low-level whack jobs we usually deal with. He’s smart, he’s ruthless, and he’s very, very powerful.” “Okay, okay.”
― Scott William Carter, Ghost Detective

“You become a great writer by writing lots and lots of stories, not by rewriting the same story over and over again.”
― Scott William Carter

“...I realized that even when people know the pep talk is phony, they still want to hear it. Maybe it was easier to believe a lie when somebody else was saying it rather than you saying it to yourself.”
― Scott William Carter, The Last Great Getaway of the Water Balloon Boys

“She pointed ahead of us. A mother with two young girls, eyeing me fearfully, was ushering the girls away from us as if I was carrying the plague. I was going to ask Billie if they were living or ghosts, but of course it didn’t matter. If they were living, they were freaked out because I appeared to be talking to myself. If they were ghosts, they were freaked out because I was having a conversation with a ghost, which made me just as frightening to them.”
― Scott William Carter, Ghost Detective

“I just wanted to look at her. She lay motionless, her eyes closed, her face more peaceful than it had ever looked in life. Dressed in a flowing white nightgown, an exquisite combination of silk and lace, there was an almost angelic quality to her. It was the kind of nightgown that was indistinguishable from an evening dress, but she still would have been mortified to be seen this way by anyone other than her husband.”
― Scott William Carter, Ghost Detective

“She smiled impishly. “You don’t want to talk about it. And yet you’re perfectly willing to lecture me about my relationship problems. Must be a white-guy thing.”
― Scott William Carter, Ghost Detective

“She's not really that rude. She tells me she acts that way 'cause she's a nihilist. I don't know what that is exactly, but I figure it's like having the cramps all the time.”
― Scott William Carter, The Gray and Guilty Sea

“Most scholars believe he wasn't talking about God personified, but instead about the shared cultural belief in God, something that bound people together until the Enlightenment. He was mostly concerned that that shared belief helped create a moral foundation for mankind, and without it, something would have to take its place or man's worst nature would run rampant”
― Scott William Carter, The Gray and Guilty Sea

“To really get over a loss of any kind of magnitude, you had to feel sorry for yourself. You had to be okay with that, with that kind of indulgence. You had to treat yourself the way you would treat someone else who'd suffered in a similar way. For some of us, maybe for a lot of us, that was hard to do. Why”
― Scott William Carter, The Ghost, the Girl, and the Gold

“Glock aimed at him, safety off,”
― Scott William Carter, Ghost Detective

“Let me get this straight,” I said. “You’re painting a picture to hang in an office that I don’t have yet, for a job that I don’t want?” “No, I’m painting a picture for an office that you’re going to rent for a job you haven’t figured out you already have.” “Uh-huh. And it will look just like a blank canvas to every other living person but me. Only the ghosts will be able to see what it is.”
― Scott William Carter, Ghost Detective

“No, he doesn’t have to believe in Bigfoot. But he doesn’t even believe in the stuff that everybody believes in.” “Like what?” “I don’t know. Like the stuff everybody knows is true.” “Death and taxes?” I offered. She sighed.”
― Scott William Carter, Ghost Detective

“The darkness could have lasted a second or a day or a year, it was all the same to me—an endless stretch of nothingness and no feeling and best of all, no pain.”
― Scott William Carter, Ghost Detective

“There may have been some small part of me that knew there was at least a tiny chance I’d recognize the person in the picture, but I never in a million years expected this. It was the man who’d shot me.”
― Scott William Carter, Ghost Detective

“Harriet Quinn's daughter.”
― Scott William Carter, Bury the Dead in Driftwood

“After the body was carted away, the bloodstains on his linoleum looked like an abstract painting by Jackson Pollock.”
― Scott William Carter, The Gray and Guilty Sea

“Is it a panic attack or something?” she said. “Sure,” I said. “What do you mean, sure? You mean that’s it?” “I mean I don’t know.” “Come on, Myron. I’m here. I’m listening.” “I just didn’t think it would be this hard.” “What would be this hard?” “Living.”
― Scott William Carter, Ghost Detective

“eight years younger than me, but the distance between us seemed much more vast now, ages come and gone, civilizations risen and fallen, eons of struggle and suffering.”
― Scott William Carter, Ghost Detective

“I was an empty room. Take away all the junk, all my problems and troubles, and I was a hollow man. There was nothing left of me worth saving anymore. I don’t know how long I’d been sitting there when I heard the door creak open.”
― Scott William Carter, Ghost Detective

“I saw that he had a brown mustache so thick I wouldn’t have been surprised to see it crawl off his face.”
― Scott William Carter, Ghost Detective

“I really, really need your help,” she said. “Yes, you’ve said that.” “I have to know if he killed me, Myron—and if he did, then why. I can’t rest in peace until I know.”
― Scott William Carter, Ghost Detective

“The need for revenge is an inferno that consumes all, leaving nothing and no one unburned.”
― Scott William Carter, Ghost Detective

“Fine,” she said, “you win. Keep your relationship troubles to yourself. But I’m still going to tell you my ghost story when you come back with your coffee, crackerjack.” “I think I liked honky boy better,” I said.”
― Scott William Carter, Ghost Detective

“was all too much. I’d had enough. Every time I thought maybe I could pick myself up, find a way to deal with my issues, something happened to set me back. I felt like a jigsaw puzzle where none of the pieces matched.”
― Scott William Carter, Ghost Detective

“disappeared”
― Scott William Carter, Ghost Detective

“Death took everything that mattered to us eventually, sometimes all at once, sometimes a little at a time. All that was left afterward were lots of ghosts, not just the human kind, but faint echoes of our former lives, reminding us of all that we had lost.”
― Scott William Carter, Ghost Detective

“What? You are white. Or don’t you believe in that either, honky boy?” “Honky boy? Really? What is this, an episode of Shaft?”
― Scott William Carter, Ghost Detective

“counting the blocks until I could get my wake-the-hell-up caffeine fix.”
― Scott William Carter, Ghost Detective

“This was different. This was living in the moment, with no expectations. For once, he wasn't waiting for everything to go to hell. Naturally,”
― Scott William Carter, A Shroud of Tattered Sails

“On the other side of the park, two goth girls leaned against the chain-link fence, eyeing me warily. Their cigarettes burned in the near-dark like distant jet engines.”
― Scott William Carter, Ghost Detective