Jordan Harper > Quotes

“She had a teddy bear in her arms and murder in her eyes.”
― Jordan Harper, She Rides Shotgun

“He could have laughed at how fucked up life was. That soon as you found something to live for, you found something to die for too. But he guessed in the end it was a good trade.”
― Jordan Harper, She Rides Shotgun

“You got to feel weak to get strong. Don’t run away from it.”
― Jordan Harper, She Rides Shotgun

“She drives home in a trance, lets the stranger in her skull navigate her home. She looks at all the chain restaurants and closed-down big-box stores. She thinks about how everything we've built feels like the inside of a drugstore. Everything is emptied out; everything is locked down and full of bad light; everything is polluted by artificial flavors, artificial voices, artificial thoughts. Everything you buy is wrapped in thick plastic, with no way to open it, so you have to attack packages with scissors or your teeth, and then you better recycle that plastic or somehow the whole burning world is your fault. Everything feels haunted. Haunted by the past, haunted by the present we won't let ourselves see. Our phones cursed with AI images and robot calls and nameless texts. Our minds possessed by some rising intensity we cannot name, cannot face. So we raise our own plastic shields, lock ourselves down, in the name of loss prevention.”
― Jordan Harper, A Violent Masterpiece

“This feeling washes over her, this soul-deep wish to just go back to when she could walk through this burning world without noticing it’s on fire.”
― Jordan Harper, Everybody Knows

“Most people who facilitate things like this hate themselves for doing it—and they think that makes it okay. Like it’s not really them who is doing it.”
― Jordan Harper, Everybody Knows

“You know the difference between a million and a billion? A million seconds is eleven days. A billion seconds is thirty-two years. Kyser has billions, man.”
― Jordan Harper, Everybody Knows

“God put wrath on the list of sins—after murdering every firstborn child of Egypt. The weak-minded call a thing like that hypocrisy. But it is simply a message. The sovereign is he who decides the exception to the rule.”
― Jordan Harper, A Violent Masterpiece

“She buried her head in a towel. She scrubbed, not just her hair, but her face too, the towel scratching, pressing it into the sockets of her eyes until she saw color galaxies be born and die in the dark behind her eyelids.”
― Jordan Harper, She Rides Shotgun

“She thought it was the police who were really missing. They were the ones who weren’t where they were supposed to be, which was coming to get her.”
― Jordan Harper, She Rides Shotgun

“It was an intimate moment, this moment between robber and victim. A gun to the head made you naked.”
― Jordan Harper, She Rides Shotgun

“He had men for hands. It only took a few days all told before the posters came to a man with a throat-cut tattoo and fuck-you-money ambitions. Addresses were compiled. Plans made. Weapons secured. Blood pacts sealed. His will be done.”
― Jordan Harper, She Rides Shotgun

“It didn’t matter that it wasn’t real. It only mattered that it was true.”
― Jordan Harper, She Rides Shotgun

“LA traffic is like quicksand—struggling just makes you sink faster.”
― Jordan Harper, Everybody Knows

“Either you teach her how to take a punch or the world does.”
― Jordan Harper, She Rides Shotgun

“Terror’s what you feel when you’re running from the wolf. Horror’s what you feel while you watch the wolf feeding on your guts. Showing you what you’re really made of.”
― Jordan Harper

“Sometimes I hear Mark laugh, and some days in the car the right song will come on the satellite radio and I'll feel him there tingling like a phantom limb. Like he's sitting there next to me in the dark. But I know that's not so. And I know that when you die there's not even darkness, and I know Mark and me won't meet on some cloud or in some pit of fire. And I guess that's a good thing. I couldn't take those eyes seeing what's become of me, those eyes looking down at my hands and my chewed-up ragged nails.”
― Jordan Harper, Love and Other Wounds

“He's up there—excuse me, down there—where there isn't any difference between government and business. There's just power. Maybe he works for the government, maybe the government works for him, maybe even talking about things like rules and laws doesn't make any sense in that world. And every once in a while, one out of a thousand of them actually goes down for their decades of evil, like Eric did. But you take a step back, and you see, the ones who get caught only go down so the other nine hundred and ninety-nine can go free. A limited hangout. A thin scrim of almost-justice on top of a roiling pot of do-what-thou-wilt.”
― Jordan Harper, A Violent Masterpiece

“The serpent that circles the world shows itself in rubber bullets and masked kidnappers. Pay attention. Jake has it right in chapter 1: Los Angeles is America. Protect your neighbors. Stay alive.”
― Jordan Harper, A Violent Masterpiece

“It’s weird,” Tze says. “Like, he’s still in my phone. Do I delete him? It seems wrong. But like someday my contacts are going to be half dead people and that is weird too, right? Like we’re all going to be carrying these little graveyards around with us. Like we’re even going to be around that long.”
― Jordan Harper, Everybody Knows

“The underpass was a tent city. The people living there dirty faced and unfed. Refugees of a war only they knew about.”
― Jordan Harper, She Rides Shotgun

“Polygraphs don’t detect lies. They detect fear.”
― Jordan Harper, Everybody Knows

“It’s the best part of not being real.”
― Jordan Harper, She Rides Shotgun

“Brass and the DAs are the true villains in a cop’s life. The knuckleheads are just the product they trade in.”
― Jordan Harper, Everybody Knows

“They serve to reduce the women to objects. A thing with no function but to be destroyed. Misogyny amplified”
― Jordan Harper, A Violent Masterpiece

“Stolen land gulping stolen water. Streets paved with corpses. We even went and massacred the sky: smog strangles the air; light pollution buries the stars.”
― Jordan Harper, A Violent Masterpiece

“You got to feel weak to get strong.”
― Jordan Harper, She Rides Shotgun

“His hands in his lap grasp and clench the air like he’s trying to find the world’s throat and choke it until it’s dead.”
― Jordan Harper, Everybody Knows

“He saw how cops lied to suspects”
― Jordan Harper, A Violent Masterpiece

“The buildings and sky are festooned with billboards for TV shows and movies. Everything is a sequel or a reboot or an adaptation. Everything is an echo of something else.”
― Jordan Harper, Everybody Knows