44 Quotes by Daniel Polansky

It’s an odd fact about lunatics and junkies, but every one I’d ever met is just dying to share their life wisdom.

I’d heard that in some of the newer mental wards they set the mad and congenitally stupid to rote tasks, having them sew buttons onto mounds of fabric, the futile labor working as a salve to their broken minds. I wonder sometimes whether the guard is not an extension of this therapy on a far grander scale, an elaborate social program meant to give the low functioning an illusion of purpose.

Really, I have to applaud you. Anyone can kill, but to break a man? To reach inside him and make him something else? That takes talent.

Power isn’t something you sit on, it’s something you chase after. And it moves fast – if you want to hold onto it, you’d better not burden yourself with anything as heavy as decency.

The Captain was halfway to the door when he felt the press of metal against his throat. “I am Bonsoir,” the stoat hissed, a scant inch from the Captain’s ears. “I have cracked rattlesnake eggs while their mother slept soundly atop them, I have snatched the woodpecker mid-flight. More have met their end at my hand than from corn liquor and poisoned bait! I am Bonsoir, whose steps fall without sound, whose knives are always sharp, who comes at night and leaves widows weeping in the morning.

Mexico doesn’t have an emperor.” “That is Mexico’s misfortune, for all of the greatest countries have emperors.

For a while a person is a junkie and a bartender or a junkie and a father or a junkie and a thief, but after a while he’s just a junkie.

The lower you are on the pole, the more events seem to be governed by chance. Climb up a few steps and you realize that there’s an order to the whole thing, the dice are loaded and the cards well marked.

Speechifying was never my forte – one on one I can generally figure out what I need to do to get someone moving in my direction, but pool enough of them together and the sheer mass of idiocy becomes immobile.