David Liss > Quotes

“Sometimes you make your mistakes with your eyes wide open.”
― David Liss

“I enjoy my pettiness with a dose of wit.”
― David Liss, The Whiskey Rebels

“You are but a hard turd in the ass of my journey.”
― David Liss

“What had passed between them had been real and true and lived. Not like the silly infatuation she had felt for [him] when she was 16, or the foolish attraction she’d felt. Theirs had been a true love. Forged and built and earned.”
― David Liss, The Twelfth Enchantment

“I did not tremble to lose what men called beauty, but I feared the loss of my spirit and humor and love of living, the things I believed made my soul human and vibrant.”
― David Liss, The Whiskey Rebels

“I knew there was no point in debating a man such as this. The world bent and contorted itself to fit his understanding, not the other way around. I could not make him see reason, could not make him regret his actions. It would be a mistake to try.”
― David Liss, The Day of Atonement

“There will always be a storm. You may be rained on or cause the rain yourself. I much prefer the latter.”
― David Liss, The Whiskey Rebels

“Needless to say, it was inconceivable that I would be welome in, let alone invited to, their home. It was as well, then, that I did not limit myself only to those places where people might wish me to be.”
― David Liss, The Whiskey Rebels

“We are all driven by our passions, and our task is to know when to submit to them and when to resist.”
― David Liss, A Conspiracy of Paper

“Not anticipating I'd be on trial for my life, my mother hadn't bothered to pack a suit for me. She was, by nature, an optimist.”
― David Liss, Randoms

“I mean no disrespect to the gentlemen of the bench, but it is no secret that our system of justice, praised throughout Europe for its severity and its swiftness, is a terrible and fearful thing, and no man, guilty or innocent, wishes to stand before it.”
― David Liss, A Conspiracy of Paper

“Lucy absently thanked him and at once began to consider which among her gowns would be best suited for a midnight adventure to a gothic castle.”
― David Liss, The Twelfth Enchantment

“Proximity, I have learned, is often as effective as violence.”
― David Liss, A Conspiracy of Paper

“The less said about the things Steve ate for breakfast the better, though I will mention that the food did not want to be eaten, and Steve had to remove the singers before he could pop the things in his mouth.”
― David Liss, Randoms

“If we do nothing...and turn our backs now, in future generations, when rank corruption masquerades as libery, it will be upon our shoulders. True patriots will then ask why we who were there to witness our nation at the crossroads did nothing.”
― David Liss, The Whiskey Rebels

“You have my word as a gentleman." [The other man remarks that he is not a gentleman and he retorts] "Then you have my word as a scoundrel, which, I know, opens up a rather confusing paradox that I have neither the time nor inclination to disentangle.”
― David Liss, The Whiskey Rebels

“believe you have struck upon the problems of conspiracies. There are men who wish to keep you from uncovering the truth about this particular matter, but there are others who are only privately villainous and have their own little truths to hide. When you confront a conspiracy it becomes monstrous hard to distinguish between wretched villainy and ordinary, common lies.”
― David Liss, A Conspiracy of Paper

“At what point, I wondered, does silence become complicity?”
― David Liss, The Whiskey Rebels

“And it relieves me to learn that you are not trying to make friends,” the captain said, locking her hammerhead eyes on Ms. Price, “because no one likes you.”
― David Liss, Randoms

“He seemed a man whose youthful promise had yielded nothing but the feelings of failure that come with the advance of age. It is this moment in life, when the bounty of the future becomes the drudgery of the present, that all men fear, myself included, and for that reason I immediately felt a sympathy for this man.”
― David Liss, A Conspiracy of Paper

“What are we playing for? This needs to be worth my while."
"Honour?" Steve suggested. "Let me know if your universal translator got that one. I know it may be a tough concept for your species.”
― David Liss, Randoms

“You will act not on what your eyes and ears show you, but on what your mind thinks probable.”
― David Liss, A Conspiracy of Paper

“I splashed some water on my face again because I thought that's what you do in a crisis. You wash your face. Did it really help, or was it a myth circulated by the soap industry?”
― David Liss, The Ethical Assassin: A Novel

“It is in general and odd thing to reach some measure of fame and see one's name bandied about in the newspapers. It is quite another to see oneself turned into a chess piece in a political match. I should call myself a pawn, but I feel that does some disservice to the the obliqueness of my movements. I was a bishop, perhaps, sliding at odd angles, or a knight, jumping from one spot to another. I did not much like the feel of unseen fingers pinching me as I was moved from this square to that." - Benjamin Weaver”
― David Liss, A Spectacle of Corruption

“Think you it is easy to get a well-known and beautiful woman alone, away from her husband, at so public a gathering? Think you that, in the company of dozens of guests and nearly as many gossipy servants, a man can just pull such a woman aside into a private closet? It would not be easy for any ordinary man--at least I suspect it would not. I cannot say how ordinary men go about their business.”
― David Liss, The Whiskey Rebels

“I fear we face a new kind of man along with this new kind of affluence. When lands meant wealth, men could perhaps have enough. Too much land was difficult to govern. But with paper money, more is simply more. In France, you know, where they suffer from their own financial mania, they have a word - the millionaire - to denote men whose wealth is measured in the millions. Millions. It is inconceivable, but there are more than a few men who hold this title.”
― David Liss, A Conspiracy of Paper

“I did it, Mrs. Maycott, because I am a patriot, and if a man loves his country he must uphold the principles of that country even if doing so may make him uncomfortable in his own heart and odious to his neighbors.”
― David Liss, The Whiskey Rebels

“Every time I have to make a choice,” he said, “I feel the weight of making the right one—not just for the moment, not just for me, but for how my decisions will affect everyone. I’m terrified I’ll do something, or not do something, and the consequences will be terrible.”
― David Liss, Marvel's SPIDER-MAN: Hostile Takeover

“But if such things were common, then would we not know about them?” “They happen to women,” Miss Feldstein says wearily. “And as we have just witnessed, when a woman makes a claim about her own body, men may find it convenient to disbelieve her.”
― David Liss, The Peculiarities

“I would never find a bank launched for worse reasons by more inept men.”
― David Liss, The Whiskey Rebels