Matthew Buckmaster > Recent Status Updates

"In all of those files I read, not one person had to pay. Not one."
"One would like to think that payment is rendered on judgment day."
"You don't believe that."
"Even if I believed there was a god I wouldn't believe that. Less than 1 percent of lynchers were ever convicted of a crime. Only a fraction of those ever served a sentence.

One of the main effects of war, after all, is that people are discouraged from being characters.

It is in fact a crime for an American to be poor, even though America is a nation of poor. Every other nation has folk traditions of men who were poor but extremely wise and virtuous, and therefore more estimable than anyone with power and gold. No such tales are told by the American poor. They mock themselves and glorify their betters.

The flaw in the Christ stories, said the visitor from outer space, was that Christ, who didn't look like much, was actually the Son of the Most Powerful Being in the Universe.

…

They naturally thought, and Rosewater read out loud again:
Oh, boy-they sure picked the wrong guy to lynch
that time!
And that thought had a brother: "There are right people to lynch." Who? People not well con-nected. So it goes.

On the eighth day, the forty-year-old hobo said to Billy, "This ain't bad. I can be comfortable anywhere."

"You can?" said Billy.

On the ninth day, the hobo died. So it goes.
His last words were,
"You think this is bad? This
ain't bad."

Might have to buy the second book now it’s been two days.

Maya knows that if her parents split up they’ll say it wasn’t her fault. And she’ll know that they’re lying.

He lies awake half the night reading the instruction manual of a coffee machine instead of calling the daughter who gave it to him and confessing that he doesn’t have a clue what he’s doing anymore. Or for whose sake he’s fighting.

"It’s all my fault he went away isn’t it?"
…
Burrich paused long, "I don’t suppose it’s any man’s fault that he’s born." He sighed, and the words seemed to come more reluctantly, "And there’s certainly no way a babe can make itself not a bastard."

Can this bitch please die already. I don’t understand how I could possibly hate every single person in this book.