Thomas Mullen > Quotes

“His voice, the very sound of rolling eyes.”
― Thomas Mullen, The Many Deaths of the Firefly Brothers

“The right thing was confusing, and difficult, and sometimes Jason wondered if it was in fact a nonexistent ideal, like heaven or the American dream. There was no right thing. You did what you did for whatever reasons occurred to you at the time, depending on whichever emotion was running thickest in your blood. Your desire and fear and adrenaline and longing. You made your choice and came up with the reasons later.”
― Thomas Mullen, The Many Deaths of the Firefly Brothers

“She had written Darcy the letter and posted it from her husband's tenth-story office while he was away in some strumpet's bed. And then she'd transformed herself into a bird, and then an anvil, and then a corpse.”
― Thomas Mullen, The Many Deaths of the Firefly Brothers

“He even assembled coops for poultry, not unaware of the irony that he was a prisoner building a prison for lesser creatures.”
― Thomas Mullen, Lightning Men

“now they were expected to walk with a heavy step and newfound power through their neighborhoods. In every other part of the city, however, they were still expected to vanish, or worse.”
― Thomas Mullen, Darktown

“Another time he felt himself reenacting a conversation with father, a long talk about duty and honor and all the reasons why enlisting was the right thing to do. It was a talk they'd had several months ago, and Frank had agreed with everything his father had said, only this time Frank found himself taking a contrary opinion. What the hell's so honorable about it? Duty to whom? To myself, or the guys who would be fighting without me, or to the people here at home afraid of the Hun? Or duty to President Wilson, or to Carnegie, or to God, or to all the fallen soldiers before me, to Great-grandad Emmett and his bleached bones down at Antietam?”
― Thomas Mullen, The Last Town on Earth

“The characters and events in this book are fictitious. Any similarity to real persons, living or dead, is coincidental and not intended by the author. Past events are described in a fictitious manner, future events are described as they will indeed occur, unless they are disrupted by historical agitators, which is beyond the author's control. For now.”
― Thomas Mullen, The Revisionists

“Maybe you could drive yourself crazy trying to chart backward all the causes and effects, all the ends and means, tracing everything to some original sin that may or may not have actually occurred but that people accepted as true, or true enough. Maybe staring into the eyes of all that history was a dangerous thing to do, as her mother had calmly warned her. Maybe you were supposed to move forward armed with just enough history to help you figure out the present without obsessing over the past. But how much was enough? Where was the gray area between ignorance and obsession?”
― Thomas Mullen, The Revisionists

“Because here was what none of them wanted to admit, Leo thought, the thing they were simply too blind or angry or spoiled to realize: this life was the best it could possibly be.”
― Thomas Mullen, The Revisionists

“He was in the far too familiar position of being amazed by his own stupidity.”
― Thomas Mullen, The Revisionists

“And what a city! The perfect geometric layout, the wide avenues and clean sidewalks, all the monuments bathes in celestial light. The contemps around me hav eno idea how long it will take to rebuild something like this. Do they see the beauty around them? Are they dizzy from the heights on this pinnacle their civilization is teetering upon? No--they troop along, necks crooked into their ancient phones like bent marionettes. Their right cheeks glow.”
― Thomas Mullen, The Revisionists

“They had each survived into adulthood by proceeding warily, yet now they were expected to walk with a heavy step and newfound power through their neighborhoods. In every other part of the city, however, they were still expected to vanish, or worse.”
― Thomas Mullen, Darktown

“Doch Warten war ein Luxus, den er sich nicht mehr leisten konnte.”
― Thomas Mullen, Darktown

“Of the eight, seven had served in the war. Two had medals to show for it, including Smith, awarded a Silver Star for carrying two badly burned fellow soldiers out of a demolished tank and through hostile fire. Six had attended college and four, including Boggs, had diplomas (a graduation rate exponentially higher than the white cops’).”
― Thomas Mullen, Darktown

“But maybe they’d learned, and they’d act just mainstream enough that the other white people would accept their occasional violence”
― Thomas Mullen, Lightning Men

“Das Problem war nur, dass zwar die Weißen vom Virus befallen wurden, aber andere Leute sterben mussten.”
― Thomas Mullen

“Rake had been amazed by hos much he missed the South while at war. Even the crushing heat. Even the sharp pain of a yellow jacket sting. Even the sight of bread gone moldy in a pantry that had't been kept cool enough. Even the orange tint of kids' bare feet playing in a clay lot. Even the way the ground disappeared from view when so many shrubs and vines grew out of the earth. The thick overwhelming ripeness of the South, the sheer three-dimensionality, the way it grew everywhere and anywhere, vibrant and unstoppable.”
― Thomas Mullen, Darktown

“There were plenty of white folks like that, happy to define themselves as not-quite-as-bad-as-some, conveniently surrounding themselves with awful people in contrast to whom they looked good.”
― Thomas Mullen, Darktown

“The first time Negro officers had been needed in a courtroom, the judge had refused to let them enter in uniform, demanding that they enter as "typical nigras." ...Only after much back-channel maneuvering .....after another judge's vouching for their continued "good behavior" ( as if they were dogs whose ability to control their bladders was worthy of compliments), they had recently won a concession: they could now wear their uniforms at trial.”
― Thomas Mullen, Darktown

“So although only one of them had seen her face, and that just for a second, they let her disappear into the night, which would never release her.”
― Thomas Mullen, Darktown

“Since the white cops ventured over only when they needed a Negro to conveniently arrest for some crime, the residents had no protection from pickpockets and thieves and burglars, scofflaws and roughnecks, moonshiners and drunks and rapists.”
― Thomas Mullen, Darktown

“He wanted to say, That’s my business, and mind yours. He wanted to ask them if they had a beat they should be walking. He sorely wanted to mouth off, and right then he didn’t even mind being outnumbered two to one. But they had thousands at their backs. So he tried to look friendly. Even smiled. Hating himself for it.”
― Thomas Mullen, Darktown

“Almost makes you wonder if someone was guiding us, strange as that sounds.
I feel a swelling in my chest, and I honestly don't know if it's pity or jealousy of her belief that God or her dead brother can reach out and affect her life like that. I take her head in my hands and hold her closer, wondering which of us is lost and which is guiding the other someplace new.”
― Thomas Mullen, The Revisionists

“He subjected himself to the fact that the very road he was on changed names from Boulevard to Monroe not because the road itself changed but because the southern length of it was a colored neighborhood and the northern length was white and therefore the people who lived on it should put different words on their return addresses. He”
― Thomas Mullen, Darktown

“Hannah was his cousin, biologically, but they’d been raised thinking each other siblings. Smith hadn’t been told until age sixteen that his true father had been lynched at a 1919 parade, when Smith was an infant, because he dared wear his uniform from the Great War, enraging the white people in his rural Georgia town. A few months later, after Smith’s grieving mother drank an eighth of rye and walked in front of a train, his aunt and uncle took him in, raising him as their son.”
― Thomas Mullen, Lightning Men

“Maybe you were supposed to move forward armed with just enough history to help you figure out the present without obsessing over the past. But how much was enough? Where was the gray area between ignorance and obsession?”
― Thomas Mullen, The Revisionists

“the best way to be allowed to do something was to do it with authority and put the onus on someone to stop you.”
― Thomas Mullen, Darktown

“eremite”
― Thomas Mullen, The Last Town on Earth

“He had broken plenty of rules today. If he wasn’t fired for it, he would break a few more.”
― Thomas Mullen, Darktown

“Horace’s mother had warned him about white people, that he should never speak to them unless they spoke first, and that if he did, he needed to say “sir” and “ma’am” and not be rude but to get away as quickly as he could beforethey did something terrible. She had refused to say what it was people like this did that was so awful. Horace figured they ate colored people, or at least colored children.”
― Thomas Mullen, Darktown