Best 30 quotes of Daniel Abbott on MyQuotes

A crack rock-bottom is beneath rock-bottom. It’s a slab ceiling in every direction. A concrete box filled with guilt. During the chase you’re focused. The only thing that exists is the fix. Your mind is lost in the now, in the journey. Your life, everyone you’re hurting, everything you left behind, it all quiets down until you find this bottom, this moment of clarity. And when you find it the guilt is upon you. There’s nowhere to go. Not until the fix frees you.

All she needs in this life is a chance at a better life, and to get that she works, she sacrifices, she tells her morals to shut their damn mouth, or turn the other way when shame starts poking its nose around.

All these girls. If they saw the wreckage inside him they’d run.

All the shame would be on display, the wind taking the stink of it far beyond the borders of Grand Rapids.

Because the worst hurt in the world is losing your father’s love. The worst hurt in the world is watching his eyes change when he looks at you. When the marriage trudges forward but the family gets divorced. And your mother can’t stand you for telling on her. And your father resents you for being the one who found out. And they both, in their own ways, move on without you.

But it’s like the pulse of their marriage is gone, it’s flat lined, and a “good day” is nothing more than a jolt back to life until it flat lines again.

Cesar knew better. He did. And love. Love just makes a man weak. A woman, a child—doesn’t matter what face the love has, love makes you stupid, it takes you out of your character, twists you, folds you, it drags you out into deep waters and drowns you. Love has you thinking about all the things you buried. All the things you left behind. It has you thinking about your mother, who was a nurse once, wearing scrubs and coming home late, before all the fighting, before the vodka, before the heroin, before Cesar found her in the bathtub sleeping in her own blood. Love has you crying on the couch while you’re feeding your baby. Not even a month old and you’re leaving him. Not because you want to, but because of love. Because you love him and you know he’s better off with somebody else. Because it’s the right thing to do. But righteousness doesn’t take the edge of the sting. Because it hurts. Because he’s looking up at you. His eyes wide in awe like you’re God herself. Your son cannot understand a word that you’re saying. He doesn’t understand that you’re saying goodbye.

Dee readies the Ruger to fire. He looks down the sights and finds the back of the young officer’s head. This is power. To take the most precious thing a man has. To have that choice, squeeze or don’t squeeze, this young cop, this racist, this bully, with the pastor’s wife bent over the car now, her legs spread, he’s a little too thorough while he frisks her, a little too friendly with his hands, does he go home to a wife and child, does he go home feeling like he’s doing the city a service? Would he feel it when the bullet entered his skull? Would he have a second thought, a moment of regret, before the world turned black?

Even the southeast side of Grand Rapids must bow to the beauty of a Michigan fall.

He knows nothing of those dark roads she’s travelled, those dark deeds she’s done, the doors she’s locked her innocence in. That Joy Green is gone. Those keys are lost. Jackie loves a memory, that’s all, and what good did love ever do anybody anyway.

Her mother wears it in her eyes: the grief, the regrets, the guilt. She has the body of a twenty-year-old. Eyes like she’s fifty. Dark purple circles. Wrinkle wings along the edges. This woman who used to fill her mind with princess stories, castles and dragons and magic rings that transported Lyric to other worlds. But there are no castles on the southeast side. And the only princesses in Grand Rapids are white and Dutch and oblivious to this life.

He’s only ever wanted solace. To thrive in the crevices of existence, slip into the dark cracks of life and avoid the noise. But the noise finds him, the chaos—it’s persistent beckoning toward a path that is not his own. Can never be his own. He needs seclusion. Yet every tangible ability he has requires an audience.

He starts to tell Isaac about his sobriety, but something stops him. Like if he speaks the words aloud he’ll jinx it. Like he’ll piss his demons off and they’ll come lurking about, reenergized, and give him another beating.

He wanted to enslave himself in something so he could set himself free.

Isaac gives his grief to the concrete. It makes sense. But Jackson can’t help but wonder: what happens when the concrete is gone? What happens when the grief digs itself out of the darkness?

Isaac Page was born in this shit. Joey Cane had tossed himself off of a building and landed in it.

It’s like she’s floating inside of herself, in the dark, and whatever hasn’t already emptied inside her is emptying now...

It’s the spotlight that bothers him. Isaac left the concrete for the darkness. Where he could look into his life and learn. And Miles is promising to put a spotlight on that darkness. And bring back the gaze of the world that chased him there.

It was never a gift; it was refuge. It was his hole. A coffin he crawled into. And now it’s like the world wants to crawl in it with him. The same world he is trying to hide from.

Joy Green has that beast in her. That thing that devours. That greedy parasitic whisper that resides in the bones. And it’s just getting started with her. The only way out is to slay it and Joy’s not the slaying type. Now Cesar’s calculating his losses and he’s livid, with himself, blinded by his own ambition, too stupid to see that thing in her, knowing that beast is going to eat and thinking… Why not be the hand that feeds it?

Leaving's not an option when there's nowhere to go.

Love knows no grave. Real love can rise from the ashes.

She hasn’t aged a day, besides the sadness in her eyes.

The delivery room is cold and it has a view of the city. A view of smokestacks and snow-kissed rooftops. An industrial grid of squares that seem to go on for miles. And the snowflakes have wings. Big white butterflies suspended in air. The kind kids like to catch on their tongues.

The gunshots became louder after Joey died. Isaac’s been hearing them on the southeast side for years, but before Joey was murdered they were nothing more than loud snaps in the night. Now they are real. Bullets that hit something. A car door. A window. A ball. A child playing with her Lincoln Logs in the living room. But most times they hit nothing. Nothing according to the news. All these guns and all these bullets—only occasionally someone shot or killed. Imagine this place if the shooters had aim.

The little girl who loved her father more than anything in the world is gone. Who survived has survived wolves.

This is no quick fix. There is no Band-aid big enough for his life.

When I think of my father’s eyes I’m reminded of blood. I’m reminded of hate. I’m reminded of death. How in a moment, the time it takes for an old wooden chair to soar across the room, the time it takes for a bullet to leave a gun, it can all be over. But the memory, the sound of a gunshot, or those Cheshire eyes of my father, glowing on their way out the door, those memories will echo in my mind forever.

Where the concrete kept his pain at bay, the page gave his pain a place to go.

Your life is fragile indeed when confronting your child is an act of bravery.