Adrian McKinty > Quotes

“It's been my experience that only children never learn when to keep their fucking traps shut. An older brother would have beat that out of you.”
― Adrian McKinty, The Cold Cold Ground

“Human beings are pattern-seeking animals. It's part of our DNA. That's why conspiracy theories and gods are so popular: we always look for the wider, bigger explanations for things.”
― Adrian McKinty, The Cold Cold Ground

“Forget him, he's just another red-shirted extra making a cameo appearance in our lives.”
― Adrian Mckinty

“We drank our whiskeys. It was the good stuff and it tasted of salt, sea, rain, wind and the Old Testament.”
― Adrian McKinty, The Cold Cold Ground

“George Orwell was wrong, she thinks. In the future, it won’t be the state that keeps tabs on everyone by extensive use of surveillance; it will be the people. They’ll do the state’s work for it by constantly uploading their locations, interests, food preferences, restaurant choices, political ideas, and hobbies to Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and other social media sites. We are our own secret police.”
― Adrian McKinty, The Chain

“Greek mythology has always been my Achilles elbow.”
― Adrian McKinty, Rain Dogs

“The riot had taken on a beauty of its own now. Arcs of gasoline fire under the crescent moon. Crimson tracer in mystical parabolas. Phosphorescence from the barrels of plastic bullet guns. A distant yelling like that of men below decks in a torpedoed prison ship. The scarlet whoosh of Molotovs intersecting with exacting surfaces. Helicopters everywhere: their spotlights finding one another like lovers in the Afterlife.

And all this through a lens of oleaginous Belfast rain.”
― Adrian McKinty, The Cold Cold Ground

“Don't worry, Duffy. I like you. We'll kill you last.”
― Adrian McKinty, I Hear the Sirens in the Street

“The darkness keeps its own counsel.”
― Adrian McKinty, The Chain

“A true predator sometimes kills even when it isn’t hungry.”
― Adrian McKinty, The Chain

“A man once told me that all books should end at chapter seventy-seven.”
― Adrian McKinty, The Chain

“He was one of those characters who felt that a weak handshake could somehow damage his authority, which meant that every handshake had to bloody hurt.”
― Adrian McKinty, The Cold Cold Ground

“A black Mercedes Benz 450 SL pulled up. It was your classic hood auto beloved of terrorists, pimps and African dictators.”
― Adrian McKinty, The Cold Cold Ground

“Johnnie Walker in the tea, Jim Beam in the coffee”
― Adrian McKinty, The Cold Cold Ground

“A bullet in the head will fix an incipient asthma attack every time.”
― Adrian McKinty, Police at the Station and They Don't Look Friendly

“Life is fragile, fleeting and precious.
And to live at all is miracle enough.”
― Adrian McKinty, The Chain

“Chemo is a little death that you invite in in order to keep the big death waiting outside on the porch.”
― Adrian McKinty, The Chain

“But this was Northern Ireland in 1981 which was slightly less conservative than, say, Salem in 1692”
― Adrian McKinty, The Cold Cold Ground

“Life is a cascade of nows falling on top of one another without meaning or purpose. Of all the philosophers, only Schopenhauer ever got that right.”
― Adrian McKinty, The Chain

“I remembered about the pharma coke, went outside and nailed a line so pure it was like getting yelled at by God. Yorkshire tea, Mrs Campbell’s Black Forest, Bayer cocaine – the lunch of champions.”
― Adrian McKinty, Gun Street Girl

“They have all sipped from the Drink Me bottle. They have all unwound the clew of red thread. They have all fallen through the looking glass.”
― Adrian McKinty, The Chain

“You painted it pink?' Price asked with a grin.
'That’s lavender, you colour-blind eejit,' I said.
McCallister saw that Price clearly hadn’t got the message yet. 'Hey lads, you know why Price nearly failed the police entrance exam? He thought a polygon was a dead parrot.'
The lads chuckled dutifully and somebody punched Price on the shoulder.”
― Adrian McKinty, The Cold Cold Ground

“The Bible says that man is born to trouble as the sparks fly upward. Well, trouble followed me like sharks trailing a slave ship. Even when I tried to get away it was there swirling in a vortex around me.”
― Adrian McKinty, The Dead Yard

“If you really have to get shot, Belfast is one of the best places to do it. After twenty years of the Troubles, and after thousands of assassination attempts and punishment shootings, Belfast has trained many of the best gunshot-trauma surgeons in the world.”
― Adrian McKinty, Police at the Station and They Don't Look Friendly

“Twelve-year-old Islay. Good stuff if you liked peat, smoke, earth, rain, despair, and the Atlantic Ocean, and who doesn’t like that?”
― Adrian McKinty, Gun Street Girl

“Perhaps they are worse than evil—they are bored,” Petra said.”
― Adrian McKinty, The Island

“You're a glass-half-empty kind of guy, sir, aren't you?"
"I don't even acknowledge the existence of the glass, son.”
― Adrian McKinty, Police at the Station and They Don't Look Friendly

“Even when you were completely wrong about something, the journey into your wrongness was always fucking interesting.”
― Adrian McKinty, I Hear the Sirens in the Street

“The driver had on Radio 1, which was giving us Kylie Minogue's 'I should be so lucky'....By the song's second verse I was already longing for an IRA ambush and and by the second chorus I was dreaming of a rogue comet strike.”
― Adrian McKinty, Rain Dogs

“Fear is coursing through her, but fear is a liberation too. Fear releases power and is the precursor to action.”
― Adrian McKinty, The Chain