84 Quotes by Ben H. Winters

How can we know what we don’t know?

Maia, we now know, is going to land in Indonesia. They.

There is an aspect of my character that tends to latch on to one difficult but potentially solvable problem, rather than grapple with the vast and unsolvable problem that would be all I could see, if I were to look up, figuratively speaking, from my small blue notebooks.

When I’m dreaming of Alison Koechner, what I’m dreaming of is not dying. Okay? See? I get it.

I didn’t feel it anymore. I had long since stopped feeling it, that feeling you get coming into Freedman Town the first time, the surreal astonishment that such a place can exist. A not inconsiderable swath of a major city, in a wealthy industrialized country, in the twenty-first century, in such a grievous state of disrepair. An indivisible city, floating like a dead island, in the wide water of civilization.

An investigation’s proper course cannot be mapped in advance. It follows each piece of information forward to the next one.

Sometimes it’s possible, just barely possible, to imagine a version of this world different from the existing one, a world in which there is true justice, heroic honesty, a clear perception possessed by each individual about how to treat all the others. Sometimes I swear I could see it, glittering in the pavement, glowing between the words in a stranger’s sentence, a green, impossible vision – the world as it was meant to be, like a mist around the world as it is.

I can’t solve the crime unless I know everything and the world can’t end with the crime unsolved, that’s all there is to it, so I tighten my grip on her shoulders and demand that she remember.

A question is a cup you hold out to be filled, and there are those who will always fill it to the brim, pour in all the truth they can think of, until it overflows and spills out and spreads across the table. That’s not me. Me, I’ll give you what’s precisely true and no more; I’ll answer your question and shut up.