Most days I don’t miss being a cop; being a professor is a better job. But I do miss working with people willing to risk their life for me.
Not every thirteen-year-old girl is accused of murder, brought to trial, and found guilty. But I was just such a girl, and my story is worth relating even if it did happen years ago.
Someone must have been telling lies about Josef K., he knew he had done nothing wrong but, one morning, he was arrested.
People disappear all the time. Ask any policeman. Better yet, ask a journalist. Disappearances are bread-and-butter to journalists.
The man in black fled across the desert, and the gunslinger followed.
[Foreword:] Please spare Mockingbird an introduction. As a reader I loathe introductions.
Watch your step. Keep your wits about you; you will need them. This city I am bringing you to is vast and intricate, and you have not been here before.
There are people who can be happy anywhere. I am not one of them.
It’s a new elevator, freshly pressed to the rails, and it’s not built to fall this fast.
Air-conditioned, odorless, illuminated by buzzing flourescent tubes, the American supermarket doesn’t present itself as having very much to do with Nature. And yet what is this place if not a landscape (man-made, it’s true) teeming with plants and animals?
As I see the first hint of sunlight, the death march begins.
“You’re lower than pond scum,” said my new boss, leading me through the boardroom of LF Rothschild for the first time. “You got a problem with that, Jordan?”
“No,” I replied, “no problem.”
They shoot the white girl first. With the rest they can take their time. No need to hurry out here.
It is cold at 6:40 in the morning of a March day in Paris, and seems even colder when a man is about to be executed by firing squad.
It’s a funny thing about mothers and fathers. Even when their own child is the most disgusting little blister you could ever imagine, they still think that he or she is wonderful.
We started dying before the snow, and like the snow, we continued to fall. It was surprising there were so many of us left to die.
Mum says, “Don’t come creeping into our room at night.” They sleep with loaded guns beside them on the bedside rugs. She says, “Don’t startle us when we’re sleeping.”
It’s another Iraqi town, nameless to the Marines racing down the main drag in Humvees, blowing it to pieces.
If you are interested in stories with happy endings, you would be better off reading some other book.
When you met a girl from another factory, you quickly took her measure. What year are you? you asked each other, as if speaking not of human beings but of the makes of cars.
The abyss should shut you up. Sunlight hasn’t touched these waters for a million years.
This book attempts to provide a short history of everybody for the last 13,000 years.
The human head is of the same approximate size and weight as a roaster chicken. I have never before had occasion to make the comparison, for never before today have I seen a head in a roasting pan.
This is a love story, which, like all great love stories, is ultimately a story of loss.
The moment I heard how McAra died, I should have walked away. I can see that now.