Archer Mayor > Quotes

“A secretor is somebody whose blood type appears in his or her body fluids as well as in the blood itself—handy if all you’ve got is a sweaty shirt or, as in this case, semen. A nonsecretor’s blood type can only be ascertained through the blood.”
― Archer Mayor, Open Season

“I only knew a woman I suspected was haunted by devils. What those were, I was never told.” She sighed. “I think that’s why I went to her wake. To apologize for not pushing harder.”
― Archer Mayor, Fall Guy

“They were in Cranston, a down-at-the-heels, mostly white bedroom community below Providence, facing a small brick apartment building wedged against the junction of an expressway and a ninety-degree overpass—the home of John Neri, like them an anonymous floor-worker in a long-gone gray underworld. The air was thrumming with the sounds of endlessly passing traffic.”
― Archer Mayor, Marked Man

“I leaned over, took her hands and brought them together, closing her coat. “You know damn well what I think.”
― Archer Mayor, Borderlines

“Spinney chose to drop it. No one outside Vermont could be expected to understand a setting where starlit skies, complete silence, and empty downtown streets at four in the morning were the norm. Except maybe far out west. He’d heard that even a Vermonter could get lonely in Wyoming.”
― Archer Mayor, Chat

“It's the line dividing righteousness from self-righteousness which allows believers in the latter to turn their backs on common decency.”
― Archer Mayor, Tucker Peak

“All this time the man had floated by in conversations with the substance of smoke.”
― Archer Mayor, The Surrogate Thief

“Snow has a unique way of isolating everything within its mantle. Early in the morning, before the curtains are drawn aside for confirmation, one can sense the presence of new snow upon the ground. There is a muted quality to the air's resonance all around, akin to the emergence from a deep sleep. Standing in its midst, as it is still falling, that feeling becomes as blatant as the numbing of one of the five human senses---with the added confusion of not knowing for sure which one of those senses has been lost.”
― Archer Mayor, The Ragman's Memory

“Looking out the window as I dressed, I couldn’t even see the garage. Slowly falling in thick, heavy flakes, it reminded me of a flurry of cherry blossoms torn suddenly from their stems. But a flurry without end.
I went downstairs and paused on the back doorstep, taking it in. This kind of snowstorm-dense, silent, and windless-has an effect unlike any other weather phenomenon. Rather than producing sound, it absorbs it; instead of displaying great havoc, it cuts off your sight. And yet it permeates every sense, less like an act of nature and more like a spiritual event. Most people walk around in such a snowfall as if blessed with new insight-or at least lost in childlike wonder.”
― Archer Mayor, Occam's Razor

“Mother was not as easily read. Her life since early youth had been a series of roles imposed by circumstance and other people’s needs.”
― Archer Mayor, Open Season

“hill.”
― Archer Mayor, Open Season

“The night was clear, cold, and brittle as ice, the sky overhead jammed with a shotgun blast of sharp-edged stars”
― Archer Mayor, Chat

“The materialists.” “The head of General Motors or the woman buying groceries at the supermarket?” “Both. They both contribute to the erosion of those parts of life that are healthy, benevolent, and in harmony with nature. They are the water that cuts away at the sandy bank of our existence, making our foothold on this planet increasingly precarious.”
― Archer Mayor, Borderlines