Tony Bertauski > Quotes

“Create desire. After all, desire needed no explanation. The heart wants what it wants, most people would say. But what makes the heart want in the first place? No one ever asked that question.”
― Tony Bertauski, Halfskin Boxed

“For whom the bell jingles,
It jingles for thee”
― Tony Bertauski, Claus: Legend of the Fat Man

“I'm a cynical reader. I demand the writer sweep me into his/her story and carry me to the end.”
― Tony Bertauski

“Magic is what you call something you don’t understand. This is science, dear. Nothing magic about it.”
― Tony Bertauski, Claus: Legend of the Fat Man

“The truth is not what you expect, Marcus. It is often quite inconvenient.”
― Tony Bertauski, Halfskin Boxed

“The truth is not what you expect,”
― Tony Bertauski, Halfskin Boxed

“Authority fears when it no longer has control.”
― Tony Bertauski, Halfskin Boxed

“If you had one, you could activate it and everything around you would appear to freeze in time. You could travel around the world in a single night.”
― Tony Bertauski, Claus: Legend of the Fat Man

“Strange tradition, wishing others happiness with a picture of how awesome you are. Like gloating could lift another’s spirits. This”
― Tony Bertauski, Humbug: The Unwinding of Ebenezer Scrooge

“altruism?”
― Tony Bertauski, Claus: Rise of the Miser

“Zin shrugged. A few seconds later, he glazed over. He’d been on the island much longer than Danny and asked all the same questions, made all the same arguments when he first woke up in the Chimney. But you bang your head with a hammer long enough, you come to realize it only hurts when you swing. He’d put the hammer down long before Danny arrived. Explanations only made his head hurt.”
― Tony Bertauski, The Annihilation of Foreverland

“a koan, a question without an answer, which was bullshit. A question ceases to be a question when it has no answer.”
― Tony Bertauski, Halfskin Boxed

“If the reporters all dropped dead simultaneously, he wouldn’t show sorrow.”
― Tony Bertauski, Halfskin Boxed

“turns around, his eyes squinting and hard. “You definitely ain’t from the South, my man.”
― Tony Bertauski, Claus Boxed Set: Volume 1

“just”
― Tony Bertauski, The Socket Greeny Saga

“But punishment without atonement is merely torture. Something should be learned from the suffering or else the lesson is wasted. The opportunity lost.”
― Tony Bertauski, Halfskin Boxed

“He took the cup to the sink. There, in the mirror staring back, was a circular bandage in the middle of his forehead. He touched it, gently. The fog cleared. The Haystack and the fan and the mist. The needle. Vertigo smacked him. He held onto the sink. It got worse. He sank to his knees and crawled to the bed while the memories settled. It was strange how his mind was like water and the memories swirled like grains of sand. There was something he was supposed to remember but it was so hard. Summer camp? FBI? Damn, he couldn’t remember it now. He had journeyed through the needle to some… dream. Foreverland. It was torture to get there.”
― Tony Bertauski, The Annihilation of Foreverland

“Danny felt this type of fear spreading through his groin like cold fingers once before. A memory emerged in the soupy sea of memories inside his head. He remembered getting pulled out of the back seat of a car with his hands cuffed behind his back by someone. But then like everything he tried to remember, there were gaps. There were FBI shirts, and big doors—”
― Tony Bertauski, The Annihilation of Foreverland

“To love deeply is to risk grandly. One cannot be without the other.”
― Tony Bertauski, The Socket Greeny Saga

“Just because someone doesn’t fly with all the birds doesn’t mean he’s nuts. The flock could be going in the wrong direction.”
― Tony Bertauski, Foreverland Boxed

“Create desire. After all, desire needed no explanation. The heart wants what it wants, most people would say.”
― Tony Bertauski, Halfskin Boxed

“if you’re not your body, who are you?”
― Tony Bertauski, Halfskin Boxed

“just a man helping humanity—infantile in their desires and bottomless in their greed—save themselves from themselves.”
― Tony Bertauski, Halfskin Boxed

“This is where I had the epiphany, Danny Boy. I would come up here to sit every morning and this is where I received the calling. I knew what mankind needed. We needed to harness the power of the mind, the most powerful weapon a man possesses. If we can control the mind, Danny Boy, we get what we want. That’s your answer, son. If you could have anything in the world, it should be the power of the mind.” The mind is a weapon.”
― Tony Bertauski, The Annihilation of Foreverland

“You can lose everything at any moment.”
― Tony Bertauski, Halfskin Boxed

“Good people do bad things. So do bad people.”
― Tony Bertauski, Seeds of Foreverland

“Life is about power. Those who have it and those trying to get it. With synthetic biology, someone will win. She or he will be the queen. The rest of us will be workers.”
― Tony Bertauski, Claus Boxed Set: Volume 2

“His knees locked and he pushed his weight against Mr. Jones’s hand. It wasn’t the dim light coming through the skylights or the giant steel fan that waited to chop them up or the smell of urine or the dank-dungeon cells that lined both sides of the aisle that made Danny step back. It was a sense of panic, of fear, that saturated the atmosphere like an electrical current, tingling in his bowels. The boys ahead of him didn’t seize up, but they stutter-stepped. Like the end of a ship’s plank was dead ahead. Danny felt this type of fear spreading through his groin like cold fingers once before. A memory emerged in the soupy sea of memories inside his head. He remembered getting pulled out of the back seat of a car with his hands cuffed behind his back by someone. But then like everything he tried to remember, there were gaps.”
― Tony Bertauski, The Annihilation of Foreverland

“I want to be angry, to assert my will. But she melts me with that smile. It’s her best weapon, kindness.”
― Tony Bertauski, Claus: Rise of the Miser

“Does the body make us human?”
― Tony Bertauski, Halfskin Boxed