Michael Marshall > Quotes

“We’re so used to being edited, so infected with the sleight of hand of the media, that we’re more aware of what’s been added than of what has been taken away.”
― Michael Marshall, The Straw Men

“We're so used to events being portrayed in particular ways that when they actually happen to us, and our life bears no resemblance to expectation, we don't really know how we're supposed to respond. Our lives are unrecognizable to us. Should we still try to be happy, when everything seems so flawed and out of kilter and grey? How are we supposed to be content, when everything on television is so much better?”
― Michael Marshall, The Straw Men

“The food chain has victims at both ends: even rapists and murderers need someone to look down on, and kid killers will do nicely.”
― Michael Marshall, The Straw Men

“If we were all the same species, there was little hope for us; that nothing we ever did in the daytime would bleach out what some of us were capable of at night.”
― Michael Marshall, The Straw Men

“Just because we are capable of art didn't what lay in front of him could be dismissed as aberration, that we could take what we admired and fence that off as human, dismissing the rest as monstrous. The same hands committed both. Brains don't undermine the savagery. They made us better at it.”
― Michael Marshall

“The cause of that happiness was gone, of course, dead and gone, but still we put our faith in places. We think that if we just lived somewhere different, everything would be okay. We believe that if we paint the stairway a bright new colour, and clear out the closets, our minds will follow. We'll take just about any ray of hope rather than accept that ninety-five per cent of the world we inhabit exists within the confines of our own skulls.”
― Michael Marshall, Bad Things

“It's not monsters we're afraid of. Monsters were only a comforting fantasy. We know what our kind is capable of. What we're frightened of is ourselves.”
― Michael Marshall, The Straw Men

“I don’t find it surprising that super-old people are so odd and grumpy. Half their friends are dead, they feel like shit most of the time, and the next major event in their lives is going to be their last. They”
― Michael Marshall, The Straw Men

“You can’t stop being afraid by just pretending everything that scares you isn’t there.”
― Michael Marshall

“I also could not now return the call that my mother had left on my machine, a week previously. I just hadn’t got round to it. I hadn’t expected them to be erased from the surface of the earth without warning, and put below it, down where they couldn’t hear me.”
― Michael Marshall, The Straw Men

“I don’t find it surprising that super-old people are so odd and grumpy. Half their friends are dead, they feel like shit most of the time, and the next major event in their lives is going to be their last. They don’t even have the salve of believing that going to the gym is going to make things better, that they’ll meet someone cute in the small hours of a Friday night or that their career is going to suddenly steer into an upturn and they’ll wind up married to a movie star. They’re out the other side of all that, onto a flat, gray plain of aches and bad eyesight, of feeling the cold in their bones and having little to do except watch their children and grandchildren go right ahead and make all the mistakes they warned them about.”
― Michael Marshall, The Straw Men

“The past is like an asshole ex-boyfriend, Ilena. Change your number, and just don’t ever talk to him again.”
― Michael Marshall, Bad Things

“Surely there was nothing more pathetic than screwing up your own suicide.”
― Michael Marshall, The Upright Man

“What's true is immaterial. It's what people believe. Belief is the truth.”
― Michael Marshall, The Lonely Dead

“We search for fault because it let's God off the hook, and without Him we don 't know where to turn.”
― Michael Marshall, The Lonely Dead

“It wasn't like the World Trade Center, something vile and astonishing within our own borders, happening to people who'd saved coins of the same currency in their piggybanks when they were children. I knew intellectually that shouldn't make a difference, but it seemed to.”
― Michael Marshall, The Straw Men

“The body protects itself, and the same happens in the mind. It occurs sluggishly and imperfectly, a bad job done by indifferent craftsmen, but within minutes an accretion of defence mechanisms starts to form around the trauma, blunting its edges, eventually sealing it away inside scar tissue. Like a sliver of glass buried deep in a cut, the event will never go away, and often a movement will cause it to nudge a nerve ending and burn like fire for a while. However much it hurts when that happens, the last thing you want.”
― Michael Marshall, The Straw Men

“For the guys in the ring, it was different. They did it for the money, but not only for that. They did it because that's what they did. They weren't looking for a way out. They were looking for a way in, a road back to some place they sensed inside themselves.”
― Michael Marshall, The Straw Men

“She was skinny, early twenties, curly black hair in goth/emo style. Drapey black clothes under the corporate apron, a stud through her nose. The effect was not unattractive, though had I been the place's manager I might have wanted the staff to look like they'd be dishing out fresh dairy products full of organic, carbon-neutral goodness, rather than bat wings sprinkled with toad's bloo.”
― Michael Marshall, Killer Move

“You get up, you go to work, you come home, you eat food that’s very similar to what you had yesterday or last week, you sit in front of the shows you always watch, and finally you go to the same old bed.”
― Michael Marshall, We Are Here

“Love is not a charm that pops into the world from a better place to bless two individuals before flitting back home, leaving the couple broken back in two parts and forlorn but fundamentally unchanged. Love is a fire that burns in the soul, sometimes for good, sometimes just for now, sometimes hot enough to scorch and sometimes with a low and sustainable glow. Either way, it leaves the original constituents permanently altered. After the fact everything is different—not just the relationship, but the people involved.”
― Michael Marshall, We Are Here

“Most have been torn down now, replaced by brutal information boards stamped out in Helvetica, the official typeface of purgatory. Helvetica isn’t designed to make you feel anything good, to promise adventure or gladden the heart. Helvetica is for telling you that profits are down, that the photocopier needs servicing, and by the way, you’ve been fired.”
― Michael Marshall, The Straw Men

“Otherwise I'll just shoot you and take what I need and you're in no position to whine because the gun I'm holding was bought from this very establishment.”
― Michael Marshall, The Straw Men

“Concerted campaigns of cyberespionage are not one of my fears. I'm at DefCon Minus Five.”
― Michael Marshall, Killer Move

“what people write reflects what they believe—fiction is where you go to tell or read the truth that people will stare or laugh at you for expressing in real life.”
― Michael Marshall, We Are Here