Bitter Gold Hearts

Even when you have your mind made up, you can’t stay blind to reality forever.

I started to express my incredulity, but it struck me that I might learn a little more a lot faster with my mouth shut. I admit I don’t often have these epiphanies.

“Yeah?” I snapped when I yanked the door open. It didn’t matter that the woman was wearing a thousand marks’ worth of custom cloth or that the street was filled with guys in flashy livery. I’ve seen too much of the rich to be impressed.

“I know what I’m doing.”

You usually think you do. Occasionally you are correct.

“Don’t even think about it, horse. I have friends in the glue business. Get up.”

They got. Unlike women, you can show horses who is boss.

You don’t alter the past, turn the tide, or change yourself by brooding about your hidden motives. You will surprise yourself every time, anyway. Nobody ever figures out why.

His big crime was stupidity compounded by godlessness.

Often all we need to be civil with one another is the presence of a referee we don’t want thinking us fools.

“I’m not accustomed to disobedience.”

“You are to get out into the real world more. You’d get in practice real fast.”

“You should forget Ami. I’m much more interesting.”

In that instance I decided she was wrong. Amiranda Crest was a woman. This one wore a woman’s body but the creature inside was spoiled, vain, snobbish, and probably not very bright.

Or maybe I was too suspicious. This business can do that to you. You have to remember to keep it simple. You don’t need to look for the great sinuous, complicated schemes reeking of subterfuge and malice when a little stupidity followed by desperate cover-up efforts will explain everything just as well. And you have to remember to keep an eye out for who stands to gain. That alone will flag your villain eight times out of ten.

We like to know that our guests are out when they head out. Some of them are so slow they might not remember which side of the door they’re supposed to be on when it shuts.

Time was the enemy never to be conquered and there were no reserves to help stay the tide.

I’m tempted to invoke penalties on the lot and let the gods distinguish between the wicked and the merely incompetent.

You get paranoid in this business. But maybe paranoids get that way because of all the people out to get them.

“You’re a cynical and suspicious character, Garrett.”

“It’s people like you who make me that way.”