Top 161 Quotes & Sayings by Jeff Lindsay - Page 2

Have you noticed how difficult it is just to get along in the world? If you're no good at all in your job, people treat you badly and eventually you will be unemployed. And if you're a little better than competent, everyone expects miracles from you, every single time. Like most of life, it's a no-win situation. And if you dare to mention it, no matter how creatively you phrase your complaints, you are shunned as a whiner.

We can't always do what we think we have to do. So when there's nothing else you can do, you wait... No matter what... pressure... you might feel.

That's why I liked him, I think. Another guy pretending to be human, just like me.

...being torn apart by far too many loyalties that could not possibly live together in the same brain.

IN MY LIFELONG STUDY OF HUMAN BEINGS, I HAVE FOUND that no matter how hard they might try, they have found no way yet to prevent the arrival of Monday morning. And they do try, of course, but Monday always comes, and all the drones have to scuttle back to their dreary workaday lives of meaningless toil and suffering.

But what could I do? Be stupid for a while? I wasn't sure I knew how, even after so many years of careful observation.

Since I am not actually a real human being, my emotional responses are generally limited to what I have learned to fake.

What a terrible thing life can be.

Mutilated corpses with a chance of afternoon showers. I got dressed and went to work.

It really is better to be lucky than to be good.

I rose to my knees, mouth dry and heart pounding, and paused to finger a rip in my beautiful Dacron bowling shirt. I pushed my fingertip through the hole and wiggled it at myself. Hello, Dexter, where are you going? Hello, Mr. Finger. I don't know, but I'm almost there. I hear my friends calling.

Dying makes everyone weaker, subject to painful insight, and not always insight into any kind of special truth - it's just the approaching end that makes people want to believe they are seeing something in the line of a great revelation.

The mind picks some very bad times to take a walk doesn't it?

Was insanity really easier to accept than unconsciousness?

I mean, really: what kind of person could possibly dislike me?

Life teaches us that human thought almost never walks hand in hand with logic, and it is usually counterproductive to raise the point.

As I've said, freedom is really an illusion. Anytime we think we have a real choice, it just means we haven't seen the shotgun aimed at our navel.

I'm quite sure more people fake an awful lot of everyday human contact. I just fake all of it." --Dexter

I looked around the store and what I saw was not very encouraging. There were rows and rows of violent toys...aisle after aisle of training devices for recreational slaughter. No wonder our world was such a mean and violent place...if we teach children that killing is fun, can we really be surprised if now and then someone is smart enough to learn?

Now I know what it is like to feel like a total idiot.

The key to a happy life is to have accomplishments to be proud of and purpose to look forward to, and at the moment I had both. How wonderful it was to be me.

I really am guilty, of many somethings, all of them lethal and very enjoyable and technically not quite legal.

you can’t use logic on human behavior.

She really did like me, the idiot.

I was never more alive than when the Dark Passenger was driving.

Killing makes me feel good.

And as always seems to happen when I have reached the point where I am ready to take decisive action, everything began to happen at once.

I am unlovable...I have tried to involve myself in other people, in relationships, and even - in my sillier moments - in love. But it doesn't work. Something in me is broken or missing and sooner or later the other person catches me Acting or one of Those Nights comes along.

It's always me, isn't it? I'm not really a very nice person, but for some reason it's always me that they come to with their problems.

A man can take only so much. Even a phony man like me.

First things first has always been my motto, mostly because it makes absolutely no sense - after all, if first things were second or third, they wouldn't be first things, would they? Still, cliches exist to comfort the feeble minded, not to provide any actual meaning.

I stood up. It was all too much. I could not even meet my own expectations, and to be asked to deal with all theirs too was suffocating.

And so as much as I can, I care about her, dear Deborah. It's probably not love, but I would rather she were happy.

When faced with people who have very limited conversational skills and no apparent desire to cultivate any it's always easier to simply go along.

…a cheerful black shadow reared up behind him as he spoke, thundering a happy challenge to my Dark Passenger, which slid forward and bellowed back.

They like to tell us that it is important to speak the truth, but it has been my experience that real happiness lies in having people tell you what you want to believe, usually not the same thing at all, and if you have to stub your toe on the truth later, so be it.

In its own way the kiss had been an act of murder.

It’s like, everything really is two ways, the way we all pretend it is and the way it really is

It's that moon again, slung so fat and low in the tropical night, calling out across a curdled sky and into the quivering ears of that dear old voice in the shadows, the Dark Passenger, nestled snug in the backseat of the Dodge K-car of Dexter's hypothetical soul. That rascal moon, that loudmouthed leering Lucifer, calling down across the empty sky to the dark hearts of the night monsters below, calling them away to their joyful playgrounds.

It happens; incompetence is rewarded more often than not.

And what did you do last night, Dexter? Oh, I played with my dolls while a friend chopped up my sister.

Money to me had always been merely something the sheep used to show each other how wonderful they were.

Stop the nurse like the monkey.

Happily for me, ninety-nine percent of all human life is spent simply repeating the same old actions, speaking the same tired clichés, moving like a zombie through the same steps of the dance we plodded through yesterday and the day before and the day before. It seems horribly dull and pointless-but it really makes a great deal of sense. After all, if you only have to follow the same path every day, you don't need to think at all. Considering how good humans are at any mental process more complicated than chewing, isn't that the best for everybody?

The faster it ran away from me. And I found myself reasoning that perhaps one more beer would unlock the doors of perception.

But of course, there's no rest for the wicked, which I certainly am; as I said, no rest for the wicked.

And I was having too much fun to stop now.

In that tremendous flash of freedom, on my way to do The Thing for the first time, sanctioned by Almighty Harry, I receded, faded back into the scenery of my own dark self, whole the other me crouched and growled. I would do It at last, do what I had been created to do. And I did.

It revealed a cruelty that really made one wonder if the universe was such a good idea after all.

A man who discovers his pants are on fire tends to have very little time to worry about somebody else's box of matches

Of course, having information to use is one thing. Knowing what it means and how to use it is a different story.

I enjoyed watching good-looking idiots looking at each other. A great spectator sport.

I think people understand things different when they get older. It’s not a question of getting soft, or seeing things in the gray areas instead of black and white. I really believe I’m just understanding things different. Better.

I sighed; as comforting as it may be to some of us, sarcasm, like youth, is wasted on the young.

A reasonable being might think that he and I could find some common ground; have a cup of coffee and compare our Passengers, exchange trade talk and chitchat about dismemberment techniques. But no: Doakes wanted me dead. And I found it difficult to share his point of view.

I know family comes first, but shouldn't that mean after breakfast?

I had killed our careful relationship by driving my tongue through its heart and pushing it off a cliff.

Our universe is ruled by random whim, inhabited by people who laugh at logic.

You're driving me NORMAL!

I waved to everybody. Some of them even waved back. They knew me, had seen me go by before, always cheerful, a big hello for everybody. He was such a nice man. Very friendly. I can’t believe he did those horrible things . . .