84 Quotes by Ben H. Winters

OPEC stopped exporting oil in early November, the Canadians followed suit a couple of weeks later, and that was it. The Department of Energy opened the Strategic Petroleum Reserve on January 15, along with strictly enforced price controls, and everybody had gas for about nine days, and then they didn’t anymore.

I am a question mark aimed at an answer.

She keeps talking, and I keep listening, writing down every word she says, even as some hungry part of my mind flies off into a corner, huddles with this new information – a morphine addict, some kind of opiate, for a period – and begins to chew on it, taste its marrow, decide how it might be digested. Decide if it’s true.

Sandy leans forward and kisses me, and I kiss her back, pressing myself against her, my excitement about the investigation rolling over, accelerating, transforming into that other big feeling, that exhilarating and terrifying feeling – not love, but the thing that feels like love – bodies rising to each other, nerve endings opening up and seeking each other – a feeling I know, even as it floods into my veins and my joints, that I will probably never feel again. Last time, for this.

I don’t know.” I shake my head slowly, look out the window at the parking lot, lift my cup of coffee for one final sip. “I feel like I wasn’t made for these times.” “I don’t know, kid,” she says. “I think maybe you’re the only person who was.

And surely some large proportion of the world’s current danger and decline is not inevitable but rather the result of people scrambling fearfully away from the things that have long made sense.

Alison sends a long look out across the river, at the rowers, the ducks, the clouds easing along in parallel with the water line. She is not the first girl I ever kissed, but she remains the one I’ve kissed the most, in all my life thus far.

I do it even now, you see? I play false, I dance and dance. I murmur the stories in shadow or half shadow; I pretend to myself that I don’t remember the names, the details, when in fact I do. I did and I do – I remember all their names.

No action comes divorced from motive, neither in art nor in life.