C.S. Poe > Quotes

“Have you been in love.”
“Sure.”
“How’d it end.”
There was a pause before Doyle answered, “It hasn’t started.”
― C.S. Poe, Subway Slayings

“People don’t want to know,” he whispered, not looking up.

“Know what?”

“What makes them uncomfortable,” Larkin specified. “Sometimes they don’t know what to say, don’t want to make a bad situation worse. Other times, they only pretend to not know because the empathy required is too big a burden. They pull back. They become distant. They ask how you are the same way they ask if it looks like rain or if you watched that Mets game on TV. People don’t really want to know.”
― C.S. Poe, Madison Square Murders

“Mr. Snow.'
'Detective Winter.'
'Do you give all of the men in your life a murder case for Christmas, or just the really special ones?”
― C.S. Poe, The Mystery of Nevermore

“We’re not dating. We’re still performing some weird mating ritual.”
― C.S. Poe, Southernmost Murder

“What do you think of that fucking display of masculinity?”

Larkin said, without any perturbation, “I think it’s very cute you needed both hands to snap a Number 2 pencil.”
― C.S. Poe, Madison Square Murders

“Yes, a gay man calling a straight sex hotline is very eighth- grade funny, O’Halloran, but at least my sexual partners have never needed to draw me an anatomical map with an X marking the spot that, at best, you only found by accident while you were motorboating her—a tip you probably read about on a wildly hetero blog called something like Manliness 101, where that same expert also said, with absolute conviction, that the alphabet trick works.”
― C.S. Poe, Subway Slayings

“I’ll admit the situation piqued my interest, but there are 101 things in life I simply don’t have the patience for, and finding someone else’s rotting heart in the floorboards of my shop just about topped the list.”
― C.S. Poe, The Mystery of Nevermore

“Did you not have a favorite dinosaur growing up?” “Troodon.” “Mine was Stegosaurus.” “You know Stegosaurus was one of the dumbest dinosaurs? I mean, in relation to its brain-size versus body-size,” I explained. “Thanks for breaking a seven-year-old boy’s heart,” Calvin replied.”
― C.S. Poe, The Mystery of the Bones

“Give me one good reason,” Boy Toy countered.
“I’ll give you five.” Larkin raised his free hand and began ticking points off on his fingers. “One, I prefer older men and you’re a fetus. Two, the last time I hooked up in a bunk bed was my freshman year in the college dorms, and I don’t plan to fuck in the same bed you fall asleep eating Fritos in. Three, my tastes are expensive and you can’t afford to iron the wrinkles in my suit coat afterward. Four, you don’t know my name—”
“I have to know your name for a hookup?”
“It’d be better than you screaming ‘Spooky.’ Which, by the way, you would because I always top. Five, and most importantly, I’m in a relationship.”
― C.S. Poe, Broadway Butchery

“It really freaked me out. I don’t know whether to ask for a cigarette or a Valium.” “You are pretty worked up,” he pointed out after a beat. “Add a blowjob to my list of needs.” “I can offer one of the three, but you’ll have to guess which.”
― C.S. Poe, Southernmost Murder

“making those of us wanting to settle down feel rather like outsiders.”
― C.S. Poe, Subway Slayings

“One Police Plaza, an ugly-as-fuck love song to Brutalism architecture, had replaced the former headquarters of the NYPD—a gorgeous Renaissance Revival structure from the turn of the century—in the ’70s, a decade where everything once beautiful was left to die.”
― C.S. Poe, Madison Square Murders

“People usually said to me, "Mr. Aubrey Grant, what a strange life you live."
Which was a fairly accurate assessment.”
― C.S. Poe, Southernmost Murder

“Believe me, if it had been closer to October, I’d have thought someone was pulling my leg. But this is very real.” “Been around a lot of bodies, Mr. Grant?” I raised an eyebrow. “I have enough understanding of human anatomy to know the difference between a plastic skeleton from Kmart and the real deal.” Tillman’s mouth tightened. Yeah, I could be sassy too, buddy.”
― C.S. Poe, Southernmost Murder

“M4M. Turn-on: Victorian America, cake, mystery, handcuffs, men w/ badges. Turn-off: Decaf coffee, PPE, being arrested.”
― C.S. Poe, The Mystery of the Bones

“Sex, backstabbing, and the pursuit of scientific and artistic truth. Gotta love the academics.”
― C.S. Poe, The Mystery of the Bones

“I picked this up yesterday at a yard sale in Queens.” I brought the cover close. Miss Butterwith and the Dear Departed. “I know you already own it,” she continued, tapping the cover. “But look inside.” I opened the book and on the title page was a scrawled name. I glanced up over the rim of my glasses. “Is this really Christopher Holmes’s signature?”
― C.S. Poe, The Mystery of the Bones

“Doyle chuckled. “I think, even if the body is ‘bruised, forged, stretched, and roasted,’ knowing that the ‘sculptor’ inside us—our self-will—is wielding that like a tool so we might become greater than before—that gives man incredible resolve to keep going in the face of adversity.”
― C.S. Poe, Broadway Butchery

“She gave me a cheeky smile and slowly bagged my purchases. With my cardboard-tasting pizza and half-dead carnations that granny told me to “give to handsome boy, so get sex,” I flagged down a stray taxi and got a lift home.”
― C.S. Poe, The Mystery of Nevermore

“There’s a sense of partnership with you that I’ve never felt with anyone else—not Noah, not Patrick. And it’s not that you make me whole. It’s that you make me better. You remind me that I’m alive.”
― C.S. Poe, Broadway Butchery

“It’d been a messy end between me and Matt, and that had been the reason I’d hightailed it to America’s wang.”
― C.S. Poe, Southernmost Murder

“Jun snorted. “A reality like that would require Victor Bayne on speed dial.”
― C.S. Poe, Southernmost Murder

“For his entire adult life, Larkin had had to forge a path alone in a world that didn’t understand him, that laughed and mocked and became frustrated with him because his personality was too abrasive, his words too curt, his stare too intense.”
― C.S. Poe, Hudson River Homicides