Abigail C. Edwards > Quotes

“I thought about the fruit of ancient tradition, oil like blood, and suddenly I realized that if olive oil was sacred, then this was sacrilegious.”
― Abigail C. Edwards, And We All Bled Oil

“He swirled his drink and stared off into the crowd, terribly satisfied. “Have you ever seen a face so weirdly symmetrical? Put our man Luca Catenacci on a poster for…Sicilian cologne. Those genes? With the whole Vitelli-Marzano thing you’ve got going?” He issued a low whistle. “Unstoppable.”
― Abigail C. Edwards, And We All Bled Oil

“Enjoying the view?” I asked, finally, tired of his eyes drilling into the side of my head.
“Enjoying isn’t the right word,” he returned, swirling his amaretto. “It’s more a morbid fascination with your spiral into self-destruction.”
― Abigail C. Edwards, And We All Bled Oil

“Hey, I didn’t realize you had more than one friend. Brava, brava, bravissima.”
“Eat your heart out, Tonio.”
― Abigail C. Edwards, And We All Bled Oil

“Tonio had disappeared again into the kitchen—I heard him banging around some dishes. He had this habit of making a huge dish once or twice a week, then freezing it and eating the same thing for every meal until it was gone. Except for breakfasts, which were usually composed of a cappuccino and heaping spoonfuls of Nutella on saltine crackers. As someone who had a lot of feelings about food, I found it a fairly scandalizing arrangement, but I figured it would be just as upsetting if witnessed by the average person.”
― Abigail C. Edwards, And We All Bled Oil

“Romance, I thought, was a poor replacement for freedom.”
― Abigail C. Edwards, And We All Bled Oil

“No offense,” said Tonio, in a way that suggested he hoped we took full offense, “but you two are the last people I’d accept lifestyle advice from.”
― Abigail C. Edwards, And We All Bled Oil

“Blood and oil. It’s on both our hands.”
― Abigail C. Edwards, And We All Bled Oil

“They sing to her, over the waves. The wind carries the long-forgotten song that all lost ships sing. A requiem for the lost lives and a warning to those who will follow in their path.
“Even the mighty will fall
Hear now the wind-wandered breath
The death rattle of ancient wood
And the deep’s long-lost souls.”
― Abigail C. Edwards, The Time Walker

“A single sip of the famed Hercules Chuck—a dangerously potent beverage served in a beer stein with a single dehydrated elderberry drifting around the bottom—is akin to receiving succeeding punches to the throat and gut, by knuckles studded with bricks. The cursed beverage then proceeds to either sit in your stomach and burn holes through its lining, or make its miserable way back up the gastrointestinal tract and result in the most painful bile imaginable.
The ability to hold one’s Hercules Chuck is a contested attribute, coveted by many a time walker. Manuel is one of these.”
― Abigail C. Edwards, The Time Walker

“He had the sleeves rolled up on his bathrobe, and it was a fairly jarring, chaotic picture he painted, yet somehow he made it seem lazily elegant. Like a sculptor shaping a lump of clay with muddy hands, like feeling along the edges of rolled-out pastry dough to check its thickness, or scoring a flour-dusted bâtard—something weirdly bold and confident about it. The seductive art of Nutella, as taught by one Tonio Salone. Unnerving.”
― Abigail C. Edwards, And We All Bled Oil

“Innocence and idiocy aren’t the same thing. Sometimes it’s brave. Sometimes it’s just how a person is.”
“So, ‘We are all in the gutter, but some of us are looking at the stars’?” I raised an eyebrow; he elaborated. “Oscar Wilde.”
I liked that. “It’s not wrong to look at the stars.” But it also wasn’t some failing of will or fall from grace that kept my eyes fixed to the ground. I’d just been down here in the gutter long enough to know to watch my step.”
― Abigail C. Edwards, And We All Bled Oil

“You sort of look like the type to rob pyramids,” says a woman of the Court.
“Oh!” says the man on trial, one Jefferson R. Deeps. "Thank you.”
― Abigail C. Edwards, The Time Walker

“Pia, look, I’ve always known something was going on, but you don’t ask these questions—it’s a family thing, alright? I don’t keep up with what my little brother does. It’s just how our family works, it’s like how the Rondolfos down the street do palm-reading stuff in town by the dry-cleaner’s, you know the Rondolfos? Every family has stuff like that, that’s how it is, just go with it because they aren’t hurting anyone. Hey, it isn’t drugs—it could be drugs, but it isn’t.”
― Abigail C. Edwards, And We All Bled Oil

“People disappear, in the desert. This is where secrets come to die.”
― Abigail C. Edwards, Canary Girl

“Manuel sighs happily and sits back in his hammock chair. “So many friends. All gathered here together, just because they care about what I have to say.” The chair spins so he is facing the window. “What a life.”
“None of us wants to be here, Manuel,” says Marie.”
― Abigail C. Edwards, The Time Walker

“What did I tell you last time, Manuel? What did I say would happen if you came back?”
Manuel clears his throat and desperately hopes this isn’t a rhetorical question. He tries to meet her gaze. "Ah. Something about shooting and stuffing me, I think.”
Her gun twitches. “Face front.” He does.
“Ditch?”
The bartender coughs. “She said: ‘I’ll put a hole in your head for every one of those drinks, and turn you into a disgusting display of human taxidermy.”
“Did you really say that?” Manuel forces a laugh. “He was here? I don’t remember him being here.”
Ditch shakes his head, solemn.
“No,” she says, “I make all my employees memorize that.”
― Abigail C. Edwards, The Time Walker

“You’re a Marzano, that’s enough. You are testament to a union made decades ago, between Vitellis in Brooklyn and Marzanos in Sicily. For over twenty years, we’ve done what we could to keep that tie strong. We’ve made sacrifices.” The fire popped behind him, but he didn’t flinch. “What would you do for your family, Pia?”
― Abigail C. Edwards, And We All Bled Oil

“I won’t fight your battles. Bitch.”
― Abigail C. Edwards, The Time Walker

“The whispering, slithering threads of Fate are closely followed by the great black wings of Death. Somewhere, a canary sits at the bottom of a coal mine. Its yellow breast is bright in the dark. It sings until it cannot breathe, until the blackness closes in and the poison fumes curl through its feathers in evil tendrils.

The song is cut short. The canary flies away.

And the world sits in silence.”
― Abigail C. Edwards, Canary Girl

“Oh, I’m sorry.” Deeps smiles. “Did you want to look into my dreamy blue eyes?”
― Abigail C. Edwards, The Time Walker

“I’m more concerned about your other brother.”
“What about him?”
“As we’ve just established, he is problematic.”
“Problematic is a strong word.”
“Not really,” says Cage. “I could use stronger.”
― Abigail C. Edwards, Canary Girl

“If you ask folks at Mike’s Monodimensional Black Market to name the most feared patron, they will, without an instant of hesitation, point out Hobo José—a terrifying man-creature who slinks around the border of the market, dressed in tarnished chain mail and a number of lacy $oral scarves which have been glued together to form a clumpy sort of cape. He mumbles and grumbles to himself incessantly, but the only word anyone’s heard him say—to date—is less of a word and more of an aggressive, constipated grunt. He has one hand, and it never lets go of a battered old briefcase. No one knows what’s in the briefcase, and no one has ever been brave enough or stupid enough to ask.
Everyone fears him, though no one is quite sure why.”
― Abigail C. Edwards, The Time Walker

“Lorel once told me that fate is a poet, organizing beauty out of chaos. I believed that for a long time—that life happens to a person, buoying them along on its tide whichever way it pleases, instead of bending and shaping itself around my will. And even now I’m not sure that I can entirely discard the idea, because God knows my life has spiraled into gothic prose, and even in the depths of my insanity I could not have thought up the repeating rhythms of horrible motif. Blood as oil, oil as sacred chrism, the suffocating paradox of its sacred and sensual nature, and can oil really run in a person’s blood? Because when I think of one, I think of the other—they are inseparable in my mind. When I think of the times I dipped my fingers in green-gold oil, memory calls forth the image of blood on a warehouse floor, and blood mixed with oil in the creases of my hands.”
― Abigail C. Edwards, And We All Bled Oil

“What would you do for your family?” Savino asks. “How far would you go?”
Because he’s done more. He’s spilled oil and blood for this family, and sometimes I wonder if they aren’t the same thing.”
― Abigail C. Edwards, And We All Bled Oil

“You know I’m loyal to the fleet. Fairly respectful toward Isabella.”
“I mean, you sent her a pretty mean birthday card last year, but okay.”
― Abigail C. Edwards, The Time Walker

“Sorry,” Greyfoot hedges, “if this is a personal sort of question, but are you insane?”
― Abigail C. Edwards, The Time Walker

“We’re cynical because we know the world. If we were optimists, we’d also be idiots.”
― Abigail C. Edwards, And We All Bled Oil

“I thought about olive oil, about the sacred depravity. I thought about how oil meant power, and how Savino Vitelli was testament to that—he was untouchable, ancient, godlike, and olive oil had made him that way, much as it had made Odysseus something more than a mere mortal. It elevated.
And I wondered, if I let it, if olive oil would do the same for me.”
― Abigail C. Edwards, And We All Bled Oil

“His list of natural attributes are as follows: long, glorious blond hair; rather nice teeth; height (he is six-three and very proud); whistling. The list of his shortcomings is rather longer, but he doesn’t acknowledge their existence, so it doesn’t matter.”
― Abigail C. Edwards, The Time Walker