84 Quotes by Ben H. Winters

One does not contemplate failure, or even death, when one believes oneself to be on a crusade.

Almost always, things are exactly as they appear. People are continually looking at the painful or boring parts of life with the half-hidden expectation that there is more going on beneath the surface, some deeper meaning that will eventually be unveiled; we’re waiting for the saving grace, the shocking reveal. But almost always things just are what they are, almost always there’s no glittering one hidden under the dirt.

She’s like a picture of our mother that someone crumpled up and tried to smooth out again.

The first time we met he shot me in the head with an electric staple gun, but our relationship has evolved in the subsequent months.

Something was piercing through me, some kind of heat burning the raw layer under the skin. Something I couldn’t then explain and that even now I have trouble transforming from thought into words. But something was happening. A dial was turning. You can imagine a compass needle twitching to life – the smallest pulse – the barest movement – struggling for north.

I did not see the white people, only the black: and as I watched I swore I could see fumes rising from their mouths – fumes rolling out of their mouths like exhaust, and I could see that every black person had the same small cloud of angry smoke coming out of his or her mouth and nose, a haze rolling up off the street like exhaust, filling the air, the white people breathing all that and not knowing it. Someone.

Surviving challenging circumstances, I have found, is very often a matter of keeping things in perspective.

I have to wonder if it isn’t more accurate to say that life is a series of trap doors, and you fall through them, one by one, tumbling down and down and down, one hole to the next.

Nobody is the kind of person they used to be.