Bobby Underwood > Bobby's Quotes

“No government anywhere has a right to commit a genocide, ever.

There is no justification for a genocide.

I can’t believe this even needs to be said or is even considered the least bit controversial to state.”
― Candace Owens

“It was raining hard the evening Holly died. One of those summer rains that seem to come from nowhere and catch all but the most compulsively weather-conscious off guard. She was beautiful, Holly, and much too good for me by a long stretch. Big soulful eyes. A beautiful face framed in a flowing mane of brunette hair that would lift along the edges at the slightest breeze. Full soft lips that conveyed warmth and sunshine when she smiled, and tender sensuality when they brushed across mine in the quiet darkness of our bedroom. It is no exaggeration to say that I worshiped the ground my wife walked on — perhaps less secretly than would have been wise had it been any woman but Holly. For whatever reason, she adored me, and ours was a mutual admiration society. She thought me the finest man who’d ever walked this earth, and could not imagine going through life with anyone other than me. I thought the world a better place for her being in it, and each time she rose from our tangled sheets to dress in the morning, I was certain birds began to sing songs of joy simply because she was awake.”
― Bobby Underwood, The Memory of Rain

“Cesca sipped from her coffee cup as she peered through the windshield into the darkness. Rain was falling hard on a San Francisco she didn’t recognize from her own universe, or from her time in the other Matt’s universe. The real darkness here had nothing to do with night. This San Francisco mirrored the moral corruption and decay of the society which inhabited it. She and Ariel had been here two days, scouring streets filled with perversion and hopelessness; alleyways inhabited by the homeless and mentally ill; sex shops catering to every perversion imaginable and unimaginable; sidewalks teeming with drug addicts and male prostitutes — some dressed as women; street corners inhabited by once lovely young women prematurely aging from selling their bodies to all takers — male and female; children of both sexes, from as young as seven and eight, dressed by pimps to attract pedophiles who cruised this part of the city nightly. Many of the children would be sold on the spot, never to be seen again. Sun-faded and now graffitied wall mosaics of galvanizing yet transient political cult personalities, erected by their blinded followers centuries ago, marked this alternate world’s gradual slide into an ethical, and finally moral abyss, from which it had never crawled out.

"God, I can’t believe this is San Francisco,” whispered Ariel from the seat next to Cesca. “I feel like I need to run a bar of soap over my soul.”
― Bobby Underwood, The Dreamless Sea

“She didn’t have to say that it wasn’t our time, that a whole new world had opened up for her in Mexico. She didn’t have to say that she was just beginning her journey, while I was already weary from mine because of all those I’d lost along the way.” — The Sapphire Sea”
― Bobby Underwood, The Sapphire Sea

“It was after midnight by a mile when I slid off the bar stool at O’Malley’s and began to walk home. O’Malley’s is an old Irish pub and though I wasn’t Irish, nor did I drink like a lot of other newspaper reporters I knew, I stopped by for a Coke nearly every evening. I liked listening to other reporters — and cops, who also frequented O’Malley’s — shoot the breeze and relate old stories that hadn’t been completely true the first time they’d been told.

O’Malley’s was just somewhere to go which made every guy sipping a beer or doing shots feel a little less alone in a city like Los Angeles. Some of them still had wives, but you could tell they were lonely. Otherwise, they wouldn’t have been hanging around a bar at that hour; they’d have been finding solace in soft flesh and perfume. Maybe their wives would have been finding some solace too, and more of them would have stayed married. Most of those guys, cops and reporters alike, were working on their second or third marriage. I didn’t think they were working hard enough, but maybe that was because I didn’t have anyone to go home to.”
― Bobby Underwood, City of Angels

“How do I begin to tell you about Dana and all that she meant to my life? A writer can describe spring in technical terms; the scent of cherry blossoms awakening from their long winter's sleep; the first whiff of honeysuckle in the air; and the bright cool promise of the sun before it turns harsh in summer. Through some gift from God, perhaps he is able to imbue it so vividly for the reader that they can envision spring in all its loveliness. But can he ever truly capture on paper that feeling of spring in his heart? How could he find words to describe the rush of joy his heart feels at discovering life can be beautiful? Could the poetry of his prose ever paint a feeling, or recount his soul's wistfulness that when this moment passes, life will never be as beautiful again? All I can say is that is how I felt the first time I saw her.”
― Bobby Underwood, Requiem

“You can’t learn to write in college. It’s a very bad place for writers because the teachers always think they know more than you do—and they don’t. They have prejudices. They may like Henry James, but what if you don’t want to write like Henry James? They may like John Irving, for instance, who’s the bore of all time. A lot of the people whose work they’ve taught in the schools for the last thirty years, I can’t understand why people read them and why they are taught. The library, on the other hand, has no biases. The information is all there for you to interpret. You don’t have someone telling you what to think. You discover it for yourself.”
― Ray Bradbury

“I don't like people. I don't like any kind of people. When you get them together in a big lump they all get nasty and dirty and full of trouble. So I don't like people including you. That's what a misanthropist is.”
― Mickey Spillane, The Big Kill

“In America today, anything the male gender says that has the slightest perception of inferred suggestion about the female gender, whether complimentary or offensive -- an inquisition is immediately convened, and charges of sexism created.”
― John T. Carden

“There is no hard and fast line that can be drawn that says: Up to here there was no love; from here on there is now love. Love is a gradual thing, it may take a moment, a month, or a year to come on, and in each two its gradations are different. With some it comes fast, with some it comes slowly. Sometimes one kindles from the other, sometimes both kindle spontaneously. And once in a tragic while one kindles only after the other has already dimmed and gone out, and has to burn forlornly alone.

("Too Nice A Day To Die")”
― Cornell Woolrich, Tonight, Somewhere in New York: The Last Stories and an Unfinished Novel

“She had aged with style and beauty. In soft romantic lighting, I could still see the magnificent girl from Mexico who had saved me with her love. When the lighting was less sentimental and somewhat more revealing, she was perhaps even more magnificent. The years had added a velvety richness to her physical beauty, a resonance to her inner loveliness that made her even more spectacular. She was a woman in every sense of the word, yet so much of the young girl remained in those dark and lovely eyes it made you feel young again too.”
― Bobby Underwood, Just Beyond Love

“If you only read the books that everyone else is reading, you can only think what everyone else is thinking.”
― Haruki Murakami, Norwegian Wood

“I frowned, staring into the eerie blackness along Route 33 truckers always complained about. It is odd how we rarely encounter true darkness. Somewhere, there is always light; a house, a town, headlights. Not here. Just total and complete darkness. I had been on the night run for months, long enough to get accustomed to total darkness if not entirely comfortable with it. What concerned me was the silence. I'd often had to pull over and take a pee along that godforsaken beltway. There were crickets rubbing their legs together in the cotton and wheat, grasshoppers jumping through the corn stalks, and June bugs flittering above the fields. Occasionally while relieving myself I'd even hear a lone armadillo burrowing. Tonight, however, I heard nothing. Less than nothing. Always there existed a strangeness here the truckers talked about, but tonight something had inexplicably hushed the sounds of night and made it stranger. The silence itself was dead; the kind of silence you get high up in the mountains when it snows, hushing the entire world beneath a white blanket. The blanket along Damnation Road was black, and it felt…unnatural." - NIGHT RUN - Bobby Underwood”
― Bobby Underwood, Night Run

“Like a wind crying endlessly through the universe, Time carries away the names and the deeds of conquerors and commoners alike. And all that we were, all that remains, is in the memories of those who cared we came this way for a brief moment.”
― Harlan Ellison

“I took the photos with me and heard Lucija making the call. As I closed the door behind me, I caught the scent of death from the patio, carried on the breeze moving the branches of the olive trees.”
― Bobby Underwood, Eight Blonde Dolls

“A Commie. She was a jerky Red. She owned all the trimmings and she was still a Red. What the hell was she hoping for, a government order to share it all with the masses? Yeah. A joint like this would suddenly assume a new owner under a new regime. A fat little general, a ranking secret policeman, somebody. Sure, it's great to be a Commie . . . as long as you're top dog. Who the hell was supposed to be fooled by all the crap?”
― Mickey Spillane, One Lonely Night

“Beware of those who criticize you when you deserve some praise for an achievement, for it is they who secretly desire to be worshiped.”
― Suzy Kassem, Rise Up and Salute the Sun: The Writings of Suzy Kassem

“There is no distance on this earth as far away as yesterday.”
― Robert Nathan

“For ships which pass only briefly on a moonlit sea leave no less of a wake departing than one anchored for many seasons.”
― Bobby Underwood, The Beautiful Island

“For her beauty is a velvet sea, its depths too great for man to fathom, and her love the whirlpool in which he spirals downward, ever downward, towards heaven.”
― Bobby Underwood, The Velvet Sea

“For death is a spider's web, and once caught within its silky strands, our only hope of escape is to kill the spider.”
― Bobby Underwood, The Sensual Sea

“Depending on whether you were a glass-half-full or glass-half-empty sort it was either very late at night or the wee hours of morning as I cast my line into the aquamarine waters of Cozumel and saw her head sticking up out of the low tide about twenty yards to my left.”
― Bobby Underwood, The Turquoise Shroud

“I felt myself being blown about in a different kind of storm, my landing much more uncertain than those delicate flakes falling from the sky.”
― Bobby Underwood, Grover's Creek

“I became insane, with long intervals of horrible sanity.”
― Edgar Allan Poe

“Ability is what you're capable of doing. Motivation determines what you do. Attitude determines how well you do it. ”
― Raymond Chandler

“The walls of books around him, dense with the past, formed a kind of insulation against the present world and its disasters.”
― Ross McDonald

“Chandler wrote like a slumming angel and invested the sun-blinded streets of Los Angeles with a romantic presence.”
― Ross MacDonald

“There was nothing wrong with Southern California that a rise in the ocean level wouldn't cure.”
― Ross Macdonald, The Drowning Pool

“We were about to give up and call it a night when somebody threw the girl off the bridge.”
― John D. MacDonald, Darker Than Amber

“To acquire the habit of reading is to construct for yourself a refuge from almost all the miseries of life.”
― W. Somerset Maugham, Books and You