Best 30 quotes of Michael Marshall Smith on MyQuotes

Michael Marshall Smith

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    Michael Marshall Smith

    Being truly aimless is like being dead. It may even be the same thing, or worse. It is the aimless who find the wrong roads, and drive down them, simply because they have nowhere else to go.

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    Michael Marshall Smith

    Death is real. Death changes things. Everything else is filler, merely a message from our sponsor.

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    Michael Marshall Smith

    Everything you've done, everything you've seen, everything you've become, remains. You never can go back, only forward, and if you don't bring the whole of yourself with you, you'll never see the sun again.

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    Michael Marshall Smith

    First time you hear something, it sounds outlandish and broken and like it doesn't make sense. But once it's been in your head awhile it's as if the other thoughts in there wriggle out of the way to give it some room.

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    Michael Marshall Smith

    It's simply the way things are when people come together out of hurt rather than happiness. When you try to use people as band-aids you merely reinfect the wound, and every moment you spend with them is like a speck of glass working itself deeper into your flesh.

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    Michael Marshall Smith

    Love and death are very similar. They're the times in your life when you most want to believe in magic, when you yearn for some symbolic act or retrospective edit that can change the world you find yourself in.

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    Michael Marshall Smith

    Making something secret makes it too important, elevates it to the point where it runs your life from the shadows. If you hide what's at your core from other people for too long, sooner or later you end up hiding it from yourself and waking up with no idea of who you are.

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    Michael Marshall Smith

    Nobody likes to see a body, but it's better than seeing a ghost. Bodies just make you doubt the world and the people in it. Ghosts make you doubt everything, and to doubt it in a part of the mind that has no words to answer the question, where the comforting promises you make yourself are neither believed nor even really understood.

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    Michael Marshall Smith

    One of the most subtle and powerful writers of dark fiction - a unique voice.

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    Michael Marshall Smith

    Scrivener is where I live. I'm planning the next novel, two screenplays and a couple of short stories with it and it's amazing how fluid the software makes the process. I genuinely think this is the biggest software advance for writers since the word processor.

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    Michael Marshall Smith

    When a writer with a voice as good as Richard Christian Matheson's tells you something, you have no choice but to listen. In THE RITUAL OF ILLUSION the voices are legion, and the gaps between their testimonies drag us closer to understanding the darkly beating heart of all our, ephemeral, transfixing dreams. Dark, subtle, horrifically funny.

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    Michael Marshall Smith

    When you meet someone you love, then you change for good. That’s why the other person will never know or understand the earlier you, and why you can never change back. And why, when that person starts to go, you’ll feel the tear deep in your heart long before your head has the slightest clue what’s going on.

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    Michael Marshall Smith

    You can send people letters, and show them photos, but they can never come to visit where you live. Unless you love them. And then they can burn it down.

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    Michael Marshall Smith

    You haven't seen untidiness until you've seen a room where gravity has failed twice in different directions.

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    Michael Marshall Smith

    and only when that happens do you realise just how much silence there really is. Silence between lovers, when something really needs to be said; silence from a parent when a child needs some word more than anything else in the world; silences and in betweens and everything which isn’t an answer.

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    Michael Marshall Smith

    Disbelief is easy, Kane. It’s faith that takes courage, and character.

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    Michael Marshall Smith

    Hey presto: time travel. You don't need a time machine, it turns out, you just need a friend to laugh like a teenager. Chronology shivers.

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    Michael Marshall Smith

    I caught one last glimpse of her face, howling something at me. There were too many vowels in what she said, and they were in an unkind order. ("Substitutions")

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    Michael Marshall Smith

    I guess, like some guy once said, if triangles invented a god, the chances are high it would have three sides.

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    Michael Marshall Smith

    Is she dead?" called Zenda. Sort of," I shouted, "And the pizza's completely fucked too.

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    Michael Marshall Smith

    I wash with the can of water I set aside the night before, and eat whatever I put next to it. The washing is not strictly necessary but, again, I have always found it a good way to greet the day. You wash after a period of work, after all, and what else is a night of sleep, if not work, or a journey at least? ("The Things He Said")

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    Michael Marshall Smith

    I was sixteen back then, and I was going to a party with my girlfriend and Earl. Earl was driving, and his new squeeze was in the passenger seat. I was in the back, holding hands with mine. That was such a big thing at that age, clasping the hand of someone you loved. A heady declaration, the closing of a circuit, the joining of two souls. When you get older you don't seem to do it so much. Your hands are generally busy with other things, and every relationship goes through an accelerated evolution. Everyone you meet has an apartment, and either self-confidence or a desperate lack of it: Either tends to make you rush through the hand-holding stage. Sure, you may do it later, but it's not the same. It's like eating your appetizer after your dessert. When you're a grown-up, the only time you get to trace slowly through that delicious progression is when you're having an affair, which I guess is why so many people have affairs. A trip back in time, to when everything had weight, through the medium of unfaithfulness.

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    Michael Marshall Smith

    Storyboarded by the West Coast’s finest, the ceiling celebrated the exploits of that most durable of action heroes—God.

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    Michael Marshall Smith

    The Devil waited until he was sure the two policemen were going to keep their side of the bargain. A man called Nietzsche once observed that there is no such thing as moral phenomena, only a moral *interpretation* of them. The Devil had a certain amount of time for Nietzsche. despite the mustache. He'd understood. We look at a squirrel and say it is jumping; but we might as well think about a jump in its essence, and claim that the *jump* is *squirreling*. We do bad things, in other words, but the bad things also do *us*. This is almost never a successful defence in a court of law, but it's true.

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    Michael Marshall Smith

    When you let it get personal, the cost becomes personal too. You’re opening your own heart here. You sure you want to do that?” “I’d do it for free. For the bullshit you are, and have always been.” “Disbelief is easy, Kane. It’s faith that takes courage, and character.

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    Michael Marshall Smith

    When you let it get personal, the cost becomes personal too. You’re opening your own heart here. You sure you want to do that?

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    Michael Marshall Smith

    When you’re a child the world forbears you, allows you your flights of imagination, your feelings of specialness. But sooner or later the privileges are withdrawn, and all you’re left with is a stunned bitterness at the realisation that you’re just the same as everybody else.

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    Michael Marshall Smith

    When you're born a light is switched on, a light which shines up through your life. As you get older the light still reaches you, sparkling as it comes up through your memories. And if you're lucky as you travel forward through time, you'll bring the whole of yourself along with you, gathering your skirts and leaving nothing behind, nothing to obscure the light. But if a Bad Thing happens part of you is seared into place, and trapped for ever at that time. The rest of you moves onward, dealing with all the todays and tomorrows, but something, some part of you, is left behind. That part blocks the light, colours the rest of your life, but worse than that, it's alive. Trapped for ever at that moment, and alone in the dark, that part of you is still alive.

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    Michael Marshall Smith

    You have to accept gifts occasionally, because there are some things you can’t give yourself

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    Michael Marshall Smith

    You love because you want to need someone the way you did when you were a child, and have them need you too. You eat well because the intensity of taste reminds you of a need satisfied, a pain relieved. The finest paintings are nothing more than the red head of a flower, nodding in the breeze, when you were two years old; the most exciting film is just the way everything was, back in the days when you stared goggle-eyed at the whirling chaos all around you. All these things do is get the adult to shut up for a while, to open for just a moment a tiny sliding window in the cell deep inside, letting the pallid child peep hungrily out and drink the world in before darkness falls again.