Tim Powers

Quotes

1. He thought about crossing his fingers, but clasped her hand instead.

   p. 535

2. 

   Let us quickly be finished with the business of dying, to save the trouble of making dinner.

   p. 345

3. 

   Bradshaw sighed and swallowed, feeling the volatile coldness in his throat and trying to remember what tequila tasted like. Pepper and turpentine, as far as he could recall.

   p. 312

4. 

   “This is very pretty,” said Elizalde...

   “It’s morbid,” snapped Sullivan. “Burying a bunch of dead bodies, and putting a fancy marker over each one so the survivors will know where to go and cry. What if the markers got rearranged? You’d be weeping over some stranger. Not some stranger, even, some cast-off dead body of a stranger, like a pile of fingernail clippings or old shoes, or the dust from inside an electric razor. What’s the difference between coming out here to think about dead Uncle Irving, and thinking about him in your own living room? Okay, here you can sit on the grass and be only six feet above his inert old body. Would it be better if you could dig a hole, and sit only one foot above it?” He was shaking. “Everybody should be cremated, and the ashes should be tossed in the sea with no fanfare at all.”

   “It’s a sign of respect,” said Elizalde angrily. “And it’s a real, tangible link. Think of the Shroud of Turin! Where would we be if they had cremated Jesus?”

   “I don’t know—we’d have the Ashtray of Turin.”

   p. 308

5. 

   He wondered if she had actually read his mind or simply knew him well enough to guess his thoughts.

   p. 364

6. 

   An angel, maybe, Cochran thought, but one with a harpoon rather than a harp.

   p. 125

7. 

   White seagulls, luminous in the new daylight, were circling high overhead against the blue of the clean sky, whistling and piping in the open, unechoing air as if calling out the news of the soon-returning spring.

   p. 408

8. 

   It’s important to feel good about yourself. This morning I met somebody I really like—me.

   p. 253

9. 

   It wasn’t fair, but fairness was something you had to go get; it wasn’t delivered like the mail.

   p. 77

10. 

    Cochran recalled that during the French Revolution they had even re-named all the calendar months; the only one he could remember was Thermidor, and he wondered what the others could have been. Fricassee? Jambalaya? Chowder?

    p. 54

11. 

    In the early eighties, savvy Japanese had been scouring Melrose for old leather jackets and jukeboxes, and nervous tourists would drive by to look at the punks with green mohawks; now the funny hairstyles looked as if they’d been done at the Beverly Center. Like a government-subsidized avant-garde, Sullivan had thought as he’d tooled his old van down the crowded avenue, affluent disenfranchisement is just galvanic twitching in a dead frog’s leg.

    p. 100

12. 

    How, he wondered forlornly, and when, did I become indistinguishable from the bad guys?

    p. 336