Michael Marshall Smith

"Hell is being alive, and being alive is all there is."

"My limited experience of such things told me that you get closest to the truth by not giving it advance warning that youre coming after it."

"Hotels see a lot of life. Hotels get kicked around. The action the average city hotel sees would give a normal house a nervous breakdown in a day. In the small hours the building has some time to itself, to think its big, slow thoughts. To wander the halls then was to sit down with some big brick animal in darkness and listen to it breathing at rest."

"Must be a strange life these days, for toes. A simple twist of fate and they could have been the big boys, the much-feted opposables, spending their days busy carrying things and controlling machinery and touching interesting parts of peoples bodies. They dont get to do any of that. Instead they just get pushed into small, dark leather places and forgotten about, and when theyre let free they often seem little more than a strange fringe on the ends of your feet."

"It had taken me a while to work out what I got from this. You didnt watch in the hope of seeing something exciting. Just the opposite. You watched because the very lack of discernible activity, of presented subject matter, made the view itself seem more real. If you watch something in particular, all you see is that thing happening. You see the moment, the event, and you are distracted from the long, slow tide of eventlessness underlying it. If you watch nothing, then you see everything. You see the thing as it is."

"As he drove, he was conscious of the web around him. The web of streets, of people, of places, and of things. The other web, too, the new world. This parallel place, with email address private driveways, it sdotcom marketplaces. You could find out so much there, running reality through your hands likea gods. Everything on the web is information; but everything is on the web, these days; so the world has become information. Everything has become an utterance of this thing, of this bank of words and images: everything is something it is saying, or has said. Its about buying, and looking, about our habits and desires, about contact with others, about voyeurism and aspiration and addiction. It is us boiled down — our essence, for better or worse. It is no longer passive. It is telling the story of us, and sometimes that story needs work."

"All the difference in the world are as nothing compared to this: the difference between being you and being me. It makes the chasms between gods and men, between men and women, between dead and alive, seem almost trivial.You are you. She is someone else. Between lie the stars."

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

"The curse of the middle-aged man was knowing — or believing — that hed told all he had to tell. Soon as you suspect that, you started wanting something, anything, to prove it wasnt so: and thats where the mistakes started, when the bad things happened."

"You got through a day and wondered what your reward was. It soon became evident the prize was you got to withstand tomorrow too. You got through it, hour by long hour, but at the end you looked up without much expectation. You had begun the understand the score. Sure enough: todays prize was the same. Outwardly calm, but with a scream building like the sound of a long-forgotten steam engine in the back corner of a basement, you got through that tomorrow too, and a flat hardpan of further tomorrows after that. You got through enough of then to realize youd been had, that there arent tomorrows after all but the wretched stretch of an endless today. What can you do? Rebellion gets you nowhere."

"One of the big things about being a man, shed noted, was that being good, doing the work, wasnt enough. It had to be generally acknowledged that here you were, damn well seeing to business."

"It was dry and cold, not bitter, but with the kind of steady chill that makes it hard to remember being any other way. I tried to imagine people living out here once, and couldnt. It must have been long ago. The land felt like it didnt want anyone bothering it anymore."