22 Quotes by Michael Montoure

They play strange games, games I don't recognize. They pull buttons off their clothes and exchange them back and forth, palming and concealing them and guessing which hands they're held in. Or they arrange themselves in a strange spiral pattern, marching in a loop that folds back on itself, while someone standing outside it taps people out, seemingly at random.

He'd wanted to - he didn't know. Break bottles. Break windows, crash cars. Burn down the world. Find solace at the bottom of countless more bottles of wine, this time consumed in solitude. In the end he did none of these things; while he knew the shapes and forms of rage and grief, he had, in truth, nothing more than gentleness inside to sustain him.

He took me down and out into the afterlife of the brightly lit streets, a haze of rain around each streetlight like a galaxy, the whole street a universe spread out like a banquet.

Time falls on us, like rain, it falls like rain until we drown in it, and sometimes, it's like the drains overflow, and time just - pools up, it seeps, it gathers in the corners.

Keep in mind that in the whole long tradition of storytelling, from Greek myths through Shakespeare through King Arthur and Robin Hood, this whole notion that you can't tell stories about certain characters because someone else owns them is a very modern one - and to my mind, a very strange one.

I try asking him some more questions, but it's like talking to voice mail.

The only sounds here were lazy, ponderous, gentle sounds. A bee hung low in the warm afternoon haze, and he watched it unafraid, listened to the dull electric razor sound of its wings cutting the air. Birds sang sweet and unseen, and a hundred eyes watched him from the dark.

The skyscrapers of the city had finished scraping all the sky away, and the clouds overhead were exactly the color of concrete and I was safe and cold in a canyon of glass and steel.

He'd grown unused to woods like this. He'd become accustomed to the Northwest, evergreen and shaded dark. Here he was surrounded by soft leaves, not needles; leaves that carried their deaths secretly inside them, that already heard the whispers of Autumn. Roots and branches that knew things.