I dont think there are any irredeemable themes or tropes, just ones th — 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."

"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."

"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."

"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."

"Today, you are hated throughout the world. If you dont know this, you should. The peoples burn your flag. The Islamic peoples all over the world chant: "Death to America!"

"pity this busy monster, manunkind, not. Progress is a comfortable disease: your victim (death and life safely beyond) plays with the bigness of his littleness"

"I believe that the unity of man as opposed to other living things derives from the fact that man is the conscious life of himself. Man is conscious of himself, of his future, which is death, of his smallness, of his impotence; he is aware of others as others; man is in nature, subject to its laws even if he transcends it with his thought."

"Over the centuries, mankind has tried many ways of combating the forces of evil...prayer, fasting, good works and so on. Up until Doom, no one seemed to have thought about the double-barrel shotgun. Eat leaden death, demon..."

"I wasnt offended by the movies content so much as by its nihilism. At a time when the world is in crisis and the country faces an important election, the response of Parker, Stone and company is to sneer at both sides—indeed, at anyone who takes the current world situation seriously. They may be right that some of us are puppets, but theyre wrong that all of us are fools, and dead wrong that it doesnt matter."

"I will re-calculate. Your deaths will be indescribable."