44 Quotes by Daniel Polansky

Evil is best served without a patina of hypocrisy.

Somewhere along the line people reduce themselves to numbers in a ledger, and at that point you’re truly damned. It’s a rather concise definition of power – when you no longer need to look at the names.

The Quaker did not scream: not when the blood began to come swiftly down his face, not when the force of Elf’s attack carried both of them tumbling out over the walls and down into the ether, the desperate and hoped-for outcome, a fatal embrace descending, together forever, into the darkness.

There are some things a man can’t fake, and lethality is one of them – a lapdog might learn to howl, even bare its teeth on occasion, but that don’t make it a wolf.

M did not like communities, which were usually filled with people, whom M liked even less.

I leaned back into my chair, folded my arms together and made like I was pondering. ‘I understand. You’re worried about the future.’ ‘Damn right.’ ‘Let me tell you something about the future – it isn’t the present. And in the present I’m guaranteeing you that there’s nothing that your supplier will do to you tomorrow that I won’t do to you today, now, right this very moment. Might as well postpone getting dead. When you think about it, isn’t that all we’re ever doing?

I’m not agitated,’ I said. ‘I’m just violent. What gets done to you will be the consequence of cautious premeditation.

Our language has yet to develop a proper send-off for leaving a close friend’s deathbed.

Time is the name humans use to describe the expansion of the universe. It’s used to arrange events in sequence, and generally to avoid going mad.