Keith Rosson > Quotes

“All these past selves laid to waste, cut down by time and circumstance and choices made. He didn’t know who he was in this moment, what was left.”
― Keith Rosson, Coffin Moon

“Marvin, you're here now," Vale said. He stood up, his knees popping. "The food sucks. They have severed animal heads in the bar. I don't know if you know that." His cigarette sparked against the gravel and he ratcheted open my walker in front of me. "But you're among friends, okay, and you're still walking upright and taking solids. You're winning. Anything beyond that is thinking too far ahead”
― Keith Rosson, Smoke City

“She becomes accustomed to the notion of home being a small thing. Attainable and compact. In this manner, Weils's home becomes an inch wide, becomes whatever she imagines it might be, whatever she might bring with her. A pillow is home, a book, the sound a car's wheels make when moving through rainwater. Small, intangible moments you might bring to yourself, might claim ownership over.”
― Keith Rosson, Fever House

“Duane Minor’s the problem. He remains the last damnable logjam in Varley’s plan. He’s heard mutterings here and there over the past year, year and a half, from a half dozen sources: Someone’s looking for you. Two people—young guy and a dark-haired girl. Guy’s got that thousand-yard stare on him. The thralls get that look sometimes, but this one’s different.”
― Keith Rosson, Coffin Moon

“He walks to the corner of the building, the pistol low at his leg. That pregnant moment before violence begins.”
― Keith Rosson, Coffin Moon

“The very night that the trajectory of my life had been set — I was an executioner's son, and so would be an executioner — was also the night my world became unmoored.”
― Keith Rosson, Smoke City

“The Curse works like this: Memory arrives in lockstep with sentience, with self-awareness. It arrives all at once, boom. A detonation. I'm a newborn handed this sudden bomb-blast of identity, this explosive memory of all previous lives lived all at once. Even as synapses struggle to form, neurons connecting with muscle cells.”
― Keith Rosson, Smoke City

“How do you pinpoint the beginnings of a cyclone, or measure the fallout of a man's failings?”
― Keith Rosson, Smoke City

“Everything hurts, always. Sorry, vengeance, even joy. Everything’s got teeth.”
― Keith Rosson, Coffin Moon

“The greatest fallacy: looking continually for an answer in things that are unanswerable.”
― Keith Rosson, Smoke City

“My death, when it arrived, came from my horse. Of all things! Laughable. This was something I was to learn about death — how many ways besides war there are in which to die, the majority of them graceless and terrible, and so many of them full of a kind of dark mirth.”
― Keith Rosson, Smoke City

“Everyone was connected — I saw it, felt the expansiveness of it, but also understood that such knowledge needed to be parsed into a necessary blindness: to comprehend the magnitude of it would be too much. As much as I had lived, in all my years, I had seen but a corner of the tapestry. A thread.”
― Keith Rosson, Smoke City

“Have we all been waiting for this, he thinks. Some part of us always expecting it, or something like it? A clear, easy, blood-hewn delineation of us versus them?”
― Keith Rosson, Fever House

“Death was like that, casual with its cruelty.”
― Keith Rosson, Smoke City

“That’d always been Bonner’s problem: the absolute inability to leave well enough alone.”
― Keith Rosson, The Devil By Name

“You can be the person who brings that madness into the world, or you can do the other, better thing.”
― Keith Rosson, The Devil By Name

“Our lives are filled with these brief intersections, these unknowable trajectories that never travel in straight lines.”
― Keith Rosson, Smoke City

“It is a quiet ride through the mouth of hell.”
― Keith Rosson, Fever House

“It’s the end of the world, Bonner. That’s as complicated as the math needs to get. It’s over.”
― Keith Rosson, Fever House

“There’s no God, there’s no devil. There’s just us. Our bodies, our voices. Our errors and our mistakes and urges. Our endless fuckups. That’s all.”
― Keith Rosson, The Devil By Name

“The fuck’s a baby store?”
― Keith Rosson, The Devil By Name

“An odd byproduct of the Curse: muscle memory lived a surprising half-life. I'd sometimes find myself the recipient of blips and bursts of centuries-old information. Brushing my teeth above the record store, I'd suddenly remember the protocol for dissecting a cadaver in the seventeenth century or, I don't know, how to operate a steam-powered printing press. I had a rudimentary, working remembrance of eight or ten languages.”
― Keith Rosson, Smoke City

“People just feel the need to jaw at you sometimes, feel big.”
― Keith Rosson, Coffin Moon

“Katherine has always admired women like this—ones willing to grow into and then remain the women they want to be.”
― Keith Rosson, Fever House

“But one drink’s a road that twists”
― Keith Rosson, Coffin Moon