79 Quotes by Marcus Sakey

Funny, there had been a time when building things was what America did. From massive dams to towering skyscrapers, from mechanized factories to moon rockets, the nation had created, had viewed that as part of the national identity.

Cooper had been at a scene once where a car had collided with an agent and pinned him against a metal barrier, shattering everything from the ribs down, severing both legs at midthigh. Massive physical damage, unsurvivable. What had haunted him most, though, was that the man was calm. He didn’t scream, didn’t seem to feel any pain. Some wounds were too enormous to feel.

Funny, there had been a time when building things was what America did. From massive dams to towering skyscrapers, from mechanized factories to moon rockets, the nation had created, had viewed that as part of the national identity. Being an engineer or an architect had once been high aspirations. Now everybody wanted to be musicians and basketball players, and America didn’t build squat.

Be nothing. Be not the spider nor the man nor the future nor the past. Be the moment. Be nothing.

That was the lure of wealth, he’d discovered: a throaty whisper in your ear that you were special, that it was all – this wine, this woman, this world – for you. That it in some way existed only so that you might partake of it.

I didn’t want to just write a series – I wanted to write an epic, on story that spans three books, where decisions made in the first impact the last.

Because artists are more dangerous than murderers. The most prolific serial killer might have dozens of victims, but poets can lay low entire generations.

Perhaps the truth was that Hell wasn’t a physical location; it was an idea that could be summoned into being. Hell had been created countless times before, from the Crusaders’ massacre of Jerusalem to Stalin’s “hunger-extermination” of seven million Ukrainians; from reeking, disease-ridden slave ships bound for New Orleans to the systemized horror of Auschwitz; from Lieutenant Calley to the Khmer Rouge. There was almost an equation to it. Hell was born when some decided others weren’t people.

The problem with the best moment in your life is that every other moment is worse.