Tyler Dilts > Quotes

“and the way life is really just a series of losses, one after another after another, and how the moment we realize that is the moment we begin to die.”
― Tyler Dilts, A Cold and Broken Hallelujah

“The truth doesn’t set you free. More often than not, it does just the opposite. It weighs on you.”
― Tyler Dilts, A Cold and Broken Hallelujah

“No one without sociopathic or psychotic tendencies can be glad at the news of another person’s death, but there is a kind of surge of adrenaline and sense of purpose that can be very powerful. It is without doubt a dark and complicated feeling, shared with firemen and soldiers and paramedics and emergency-room workers, that comes from knowing that you can only be at your best and only really achieve any kind of fulfillment when what is at stake is literally life and death.”
― Tyler Dilts, A Cold and Broken Hallelujah

“when we look in someone’s face and tell them that their spouse or child or parent or sibling has been murdered, the pain is immediate and palpable—and it cuts deep.”
― Tyler Dilts, A King of Infinite Space

“If someone dies of anything other than extreme old age and natural causes, and often even then the death leaves a great void in the lives of the survivors, an emptiness like an abandoned mine that can never be filled. A deep chasm. If you're lucky, you might be able to cover it with plywood and rebar, to surround it with chain link and "Danger" signs, but at best, these are only ever temporary remedies, patches that might briefly hold up to the storms that will come and come again until the ground around the chasm grows so weakened and diminished that to approach the emptiness becomes ever more dangerous. And that's if you're lucky. If you're not, then the loss leaves a void as dark and desolate as a black hole, with a gravity so great that no light can escape.”
― Tyler Dilts, A Cold and Broken Hallelujah

“Arguing with a lawyer is about as good an idea as feeding an alligator raw beef from your palm. I was ready to give up, but Jen”
― Tyler Dilts, A King of Infinite Space

“There's a darkness in the world, and that sometimes we know that our only real purpose is just to bear witness to it so that no one else has to.”
― Tyler Dilts, A Cold and Broken Hallelujah

“I was sitting in the living room watching Shake ’Em Down for the sixth or seventh time. Too bad the movie’s star, Jack Palms, turned out to be a junkie asshole wife beater. He might have filled that big gap between Bruce Willis and Jason Statham with a few more decent action flicks if he hadn’t had to go to prison.”
― Tyler Dilts, The Pain Scale

“even helped us plant a misleading story that fingered the wrong”
― Tyler Dilts, A King of Infinite Space

“I found myself wondering what all morons wonder when they look at a collection of books like that and ask, “Have you read all these?”
― Tyler Dilts, A King of Infinite Space

“I spent one more hour in bed thinking about my dead feather who'd been shot responding to a routine domestic disturbance call and my dead wife who may or may not have known she was pregnant at the time of her accident and the way life is really just a series of losses, one after another after another, and how the moment we realize that is the moment we begin to die. I fucking hate poetry.”
― Tyler Dilts, A Cold and Broken Hallelujah

“supposed to do that?” I could see the smile in Jen’s eyes in the rearview”
― Tyler Dilts, A Cold and Broken Hallelujah

“Without my razor-sharp wit, I'm nothing."

"That's what you base your self-worth on?"

"Yes. That and the number of 'likes' my status updates gets on Facebook.”
― Tyler Dilts, A Cold and Broken Hallelujah

“What had once been a charming neighborhood of small, quaint bungalows had metastasized over the decades into a nearly seamless mass of bloated, multistoried architectural ejaculations that left me feeling claustrophobic and depressed.”
― Tyler Dilts, A Cold and Broken Hallelujah

“fought against that tendency, against the idea of The First Forty-Eight—the mistaken popular notion that if a murder case isn’t closed in the first two days, then it’s unlikely to be closed at all.”
― Tyler Dilts, A Cold and Broken Hallelujah

“old”
― Tyler Dilts, A King of Infinite Space

“The most recent arrest had been in Oxnard in ’96.”
― Tyler Dilts, A Cold and Broken Hallelujah

“But the town of Bishop was far less memorable. It was one of those places that I only ever think of being on the way to someplace else. Like Baker or Barstow or Bakersfield. We have a lot of those that start with Bs.”
― Tyler Dilts, A Cold and Broken Hallelujah

“Most of the unhappiness and the sometimes-severe depression I've dealt with throughout my life have come not from the losses and injuries I have suffered but rather from my incessant, bone-deep need to make sense of the suffering.”
― Tyler Dilts, A Cold and Broken Hallelujah

“Daryl: I’m sorry to tell you like this, but I won’t be able to see you anymore. You are a very kind and sweet man, but I’m not able to give you what you need and deserve. We’re in different places, and looking for different things. I wish you nothing but the best, and I hope you are able to understand. Sincerely, Beth”
― Tyler Dilts, A King of Infinite Space

“Most people don’t sweat the details the way I do.”
― Tyler Dilts, A Cold and Broken Hallelujah

“a single small corrugated-steel warehouse situated in the rear corner of a lot with two unmarked, dirty green shipping containers and room for half a dozen more, all surrounded by an eight-foot-high chain-link fence topped with rusted barbed wire. There was a black Mercedes SUV parked near an open rolling door on the front side of the building.”
― Tyler Dilts, The Pain Scale

“We try to make each other laugh so we won’t get lost in the darkness.”
― Tyler Dilts, A Cold and Broken Hallelujah

“The squadroom was empty, as it usually was early on mornings after no one got murdered. I had the place to myself for more than an hour.”
― Tyler Dilts, A Cold and Broken Hallelujah

“contrast”
― Tyler Dilts, A King of Infinite Space

“Sacredness, I suppose, is in the eye of the beholder. What intrigues me, though, is that it has always seemed to me that the less we hold sacred, the more fiercely we protect it.”
― Tyler Dilts, A King of Infinite Space

“together that, unless I wanted to trespass and”
― Tyler Dilts, A Cold and Broken Hallelujah

“COLEMAN SLEEPING BAG: LIGHTWEIGHT, LIME GREEN W/ BEIGE INTERIOR, WELL USED, ZIPPER BROKEN. 22 T-SHIRTS, SEVEN: ASSORTED BRANDS, COLORS, AND STYLES. 23 ENERGIZER LED FLASHLIGHT (NO BATTERIES). 24 SCARF: GRAY/BLUE STRIPED ACRYLIC FABRIC, FRINGE MISSING ON ONE END.”
― Tyler Dilts, A Cold and Broken Hallelujah

“flyers”
― Tyler Dilts, The Pain Scale

“Seeing my Camry next to Benny’s Jaguar gave me a pleasantly smug feeling of superiority. It probably did the same for him. “Let’s”
― Tyler Dilts, A Cold and Broken Hallelujah