Scott Lynch

Next came the sort of kiss that banished the world to distant background noise and seemed to last a month.

You can’t help being young, but it’s past time that you stopped being stupid.

Hard lessons were handed out. As many men learned to their sorrow, it’s impossible to be intimidating when one angry woman has your cock between her teeth and another is holding a stiletto to your kidneys.

I don’t want you to agree with me; I want you to use your misplaced acorn of a brain before the squirrel comes looking for it again.

“Advice,” chuckled Doña Vorchenza. “The years play a sort of alchemical trick, transmuting one’s mutterings to a state of respectability. Give advice at forty and you’re a nag. Give it at seventy and you’re a sage.”

“I say again, impossible.”

“And I correct you again. Difficult. ‘Difficult’ and ‘impossible’ are cousins often mistaken for one another, with very little in common.”

“What’s your hand [of cards] look like?“

“A parched desert...How’s yours?“

“A wasteland of bitter frustration.“

I find it best to make corpses of complications.

By rights he was still outrunning his age, still ahead of most men nearing threescore years, but he knew deep in his heart that there would never be any way of running fast enough.

I have always found the presumptions of others to be the best possible disguise—haven’t you?

Time’s a river, Locke, and we’ve always drifted farther down it than we think.

“Here's to charming losers, I suppose.“

“If only we knew where to find some.“