Ben H. Winters > Quotes

“Because as any writer will tell you, an IDEA for a book is like falling in love, it’s all wild emotion and headlong rush, but the ACTUAL ACT of writing a book is like building a relationship: it is joyous, slow, fragile, frustrating, exhilarating, painstaking, exhausting, worth it.”
― Ben H. Winters, The Last Policeman

“It is a strange kind of fire, the fire of self-righteousness, which gives us such pleasure by its warmth but does so little to banish the darkness.”
― Ben H. Winters, Underground Airlines

“The first time we met he shot me in the head with an electric staple gun, but our relationship has evolved in the subsequent months.”
― Ben H. Winters, World of Trouble

“Sometimes it's possible, just barely possible, to imagine a version of this world different from the existing one, a world in which there is true justice, heroic honesty, a clear perception possessed by each individual about how to treat all the others. Sometimes I swear I could see it, glittering in the pavement, glowing between the words in a stranger's sentence, a green, impossible vision--the world as it was meant to be, like a mist around the world as it is.”
― Ben H. Winters, Underground Airlines

“Respectfully, sir, the asteroid did not make you leave her. The asteroid is not making anyone do anything. It's just a big piece of rock floating through space. Anything anyone does remains their own decision.”
― Ben H. Winters, Countdown City

“It must be that there is something in the hearts of human beings, some natural fluid perhaps, that insists on happiness, even confronted with the most powerful arguments against it.”
― Ben H. Winters, Sense and Sensibility and Sea Monsters

“He books it into that little playground there. I mean the guy is zooming like the Road Runner, skidding through the gravel and the slush and everything. I’m yelling, “Police, police! Stop, motherfucker!”

‘You do not yell, “Stop, motherfucker.”’

‘I do. Because you know, Palace, this is it. This is the last chance I get to run after a perp yelling, “Stop, motherfucker.”
― Ben H. Winters, The Last Policeman

“There is little novelty in the detective who cannot solve himself.”
― Ben H. Winters, The Last Policeman

“Now I see things differently. It took me some time, but I know the secret now. Freedman Town serves a good purpose -- not for the people who live there, Lord knows; people stuck there by poverty, by prejudice, by laws that keep them from moving or working. Freedman Town's purpose is for the rest of the world. The world that sits, like Martha, with dark glasses on, staring from a distance, scared but safe. Create a pen like that, give people no choice but to live like animals, and then people get to point at them and say 'Will you look at those animals? That's what kind of people those people are.' And that idea drifts up and out of Freedman Town like chimney smoke, black gets to mean poor and poor to mean dangerous and all the words get murked together and become one dark idea, a cloud of smoke, the smokestack fumes drifting like filthy air across the rest of the nation.”
― Ben H. Winters, Underground Airlines

“Freedom is a matter of logistics.”
― Ben H. Winters, Underground Airlines

“They are Librarians, and they do not fuck around.”
― Ben H. Winters, Golden State

“What the slave wants but can never have is not only freedom from the chains but also from their memory.”
― Ben H. Winters, Underground Airlines

“It is remarkable, when you consider it, all the complicated worlds we construct to avoid anything that might disturb us or cause us pain. The bulwarks and baffles we build up, the moats and the mazes.”
― Ben H. Winters, Underground Airlines

“The end of the world changes everything, from a law-enforcement perspective.”
― Ben H. Winters, The Last Policeman

“Beautifully indeed! But she does everything well. Have you seen her peel a banana? It is like listening to a symphony.”
― Ben H. Winters, Sense and Sensibility and Sea Monsters

“People’s inability to face up to this thing is worse than the thing, it really is.”
― Ben H. Winters, The Last Policeman

“Because a promise is a promise, Officer Cavatone, and civilization is just a bunch of promises, that’s all it is. A mortgage, a wedding vow, a promise to obey the law, a pledge to enforce it. And now the world is falling apart, the whole rickety world, and every broken promise is a small rock tossed at the wooden side of its tumbling form.”
― Ben H. Winters, Countdown City

“I am a question mark aimed at an answer.”
― Ben H. Winters, World of Trouble

“He's weeping, his face dissolving in his hands. It's exhausting. People hiding behind the asteroid, like it's an excuse for poor conduct, for miserable and desperate and selfish behavior, everybody ducking in its comet-tail like children in mommy's skirts.”
― Ben H. Winters, The Last Policeman

“Solving a murder is not about serving the victim, because the victim is, after all, dead. Solving a murder serves society by restoring the moral order that has been upset by the gunshot or knife strike or poisoning, and it serves to preserve that moral order by warning others that certain acts cannot be committed with impunity.”
― Ben H. Winters, World of Trouble

“Almost always, things are exactly as they appear. People are continually looking at the painful or boring parts of life with the half-hidden expectation that there is more going on beneath the surface, some deeper meaning that will eventually be unveiled; we're waiting for the saving grace, the shocking reveal. But almost always things just are what they are, almost always there's no glittering one hidden under the dirt.”
― Ben H. Winters, World of Trouble

“No. Skeve is not any kind of terrorist. He’s an idiot.” “The overlapping Venn-diagram section of those two categories, you will find, can be quite large.”
― Ben H. Winters, The Last Policeman

“It’s such a fine line with people, whether they’re playing dumb or being dumb.”
― Ben H. Winters, The Last Policeman

“I bore silent witness, thinking, There is no army of abolition. This is what the world has for heroes. Ordinary men, squabbling and prideful. Hassling each other, doing their best, busting the world free. And men like me, behind fake papers and clear-glass spectacles, keeping it chained.”
― Ben H. Winters, Underground Airlines

“What is about to happen is not the reclaiming of Earth by a triumphant Mother Nature, a karmic repudiation of humanity's arrogant ill stewardship. Nothing we ever did mattered one way or another. This event has always been in the cards for man's planet, for the whole scope of our history, coming regardless of what we did or didn't do.”
― Ben H. Winters, World of Trouble

“every choice forecloses on other choices; each step forward leaves a thousand dead possible universes behind you.”
― Ben H. Winters, Countdown City

“Lady Middleton piqued herself upon the elegance and extravagance of her table, and all her domestic arrangements; she loved to surprise English visitors with displays of hospitality native to her homeland, such as flavouring her soups with monkey urine and not telling anyone she had done so until the bowl had been drained.”
― Ben H. Winters, Sense and Sensibility and Sea Monsters

“Vengeance is the cheapest of motivations, it’s a tin star on a shabby coat. I want answers is all that I want.”
― Ben H. Winters, World of Trouble

“The dream that I've been having, about my high-school sweetheart, is not really about my high-school sweetheart, when you get right down to it. It's not a dream about Alison Koechner and our lost love and the precious little three-bedroom house in Maine we might have built together, had things gone a different way. I am not dreaming of white picket fences and Sunday crosswords and warm tea.

There's no asteroid in the dream. In the dream, life continues. Simple life, happy and white-picket lined or otherwise. Mere life. Goes on.

When I'm dreaming of Alison Koechner, what I'm dreaming of is not dying.”
― Ben H. Winters, The Last Policeman

“She was reserved and cold, as if having been stolen from her native village in a burlap sack and made to be servant and helpmate to an Englishman many years her senior, for some reasons sat poorly with her.”
― Ben H. Winters, Sense and Sensibility and Sea Monsters