Michael Collins > Quotes

“With the rain stopped the small room was cold, the temperature falling toward December”
― Michael Collins, The Nightrunners

“Twilight was a clear, cool, dying pink over the spring city,”
― Michael Collins, Night of the Toads

“He turned the brown bottle around and around, but he said nothing.”
― Michael Collins, Minnesota Strip

“He set the brown bottle on the table, went on touching it, stroking the surface. "I”
― Michael Collins, Minnesota Strip

“LIFE BEGINS in darkness and ends in darkness and in between is a nightmare.”
― Michael Collins, The Brass Rainbow

“Is it some kind of attack? Guns, bombs?" "Not in this country. That's outside, the third world. The Establishment is too strong. They've got a co-opted, traduced, moronized majority conned into living the way the corporate society wants them to. But there's a sickness, a confusion. People sense something wrong, are restless, uneasy, and the moral refusal will grow.”
― Michael Collins, Red Rosa

“To feel good together was, of course, the reason they all gathered at the club. To reinforce their truths and ways and vital beliefs.”
― Michael Collins, The Slasher

“Both Gazzo and I knew they were right. If nothing stood out in their minds, until we had some ideas it would be like shooting fish in a very large barrel.”
― Michael Collins, Walk a Black Wind

“Louis Brandeis said we can have a democracy, or we can have great wealth in the hands of a few, but we can't have both.”
― Michael Collins, A Dangerous Job

“The corruption, self-interest, cynicism and exploitation can become too much for some people. A disillusioned soldier in Vietnam and his socially conscious wife. A boy who worshipped that soldier, blamed his death on the exploitation of the rich and powerful. A half-Irish, half-Italian street hustler who identified with the dispossessed Indians. A privileged girl who saw too much pain and injustice. They have to do something, and then they become dangerous. Very dangerous.”
― Michael Collins, Minnesota Strip

“sat on the porch, lit a cigarette cupped against the wind and watched the silvery reeds blowing flat along the creek inlet, undulating like the surge of the sea itself, the surface of the inlet rippling in the wind.”
― Michael Collins, Minnesota Strip

“There was a bottomless stare to her eyes, as if she had seen what could lie on the other side of her hope.”
― Michael Collins, Night of the Toads

“No one depends on my success. I have no status to keep and no investment to tie me down. I had to give up a lot of comforts and trinkets to get that edge. In a money society you can be independent with money, or independent of money. Anywhere in between you're under the thumb.”
― Michael Collins, The Brass Rainbow

“36. THE NIGHT WAS DARK but not silent in the back alleys. Traffic passed out on the streets as if we walked in some kind of tunnel. Radios”
― Michael Collins, Red Rosa

“It's hard to grow up fighting and clawing to survive, and then learn not to act the same even when you don't have”
― Michael Collins, Red Rosa