Adam Berlin QUOTES

1 " She can look at you and make you feel like you’re the only one in the world. Even if it’s not true, she can make you feel that way. And with her child, it would be true. She would look at her child for as long as her child needed. "

― Adam Berlin , Number of Missing

2 " We play phone tag, back and forth, the kind of tag where it's clear we're avoiding each other, where no one wants to be touched, tagged, you're it "

― Adam Berlin , Number of Missing

3 " She takes another sip of her drink. She looks around the bar. I look at the fine muscles in her neck, at the two points of her clavicle. Her grief has not so much changed her as stripped her down, stripped her body and her face. Maybe she should do what I do. She could stand next to me and the students could draw our lines. I order another bourbon, count the count. "

― Adam Berlin , Number of Missing

4 " I try to remember everything, every thing, but sometimes I forget something. I don’t even know what it is sometimes, but I know it’s not coming to me, something about him isn’t coming to me and when that happens, when a piece is missing, it makes me crazy. I don’t know what to do with that. "

― Adam Berlin

5 " Her grief has not so much changed her as stripped her down, stripped her body and her face. "

― Adam Berlin , Number of Missing

6 " The digging continues ... Ground Zero it looks more and more like a construction site. Too much of the horror is gone. No fire. No smoke ... What was war becomes peace, becomes peaceful. But in the coil of my testicles there's an angry residue and in places I can't even name, places inside my throat and behind my chest, I'm sad, and sometimes worse than sad, less than sad, a cavity of empty. "

― Adam Berlin , Number of Missing

7 " And I'd noticed her eyes, the lightest blue, and alive, moving here and there and then staring straight on. And now there's darkness under her eyes like she hasn't slept well for too many days, almost like someone punched her just hard enough to leave a little black, a quarter-moon smudge under each eye. "

― Adam Berlin , Number of Missing

8 " He wanted to break me, the me I'd made, the me I'd needed to make, my need, mine, my whole life since I could remember. I didn't want to hear him that night. When I was ready to change I'd change. When life opens up before you, when you don't really know death ... it's easy to promise yourself change. Keeping the lines hard, the parts of me separate, was what I knew, how I lived. "

― Adam Berlin , Number of Missing

9 " Anger, hate, blind temper, that crazy switch to destroy, all of it purified into discipline and control, the best side of boxing, Billy says. "

― Adam Berlin , Both Members of the Club: A Novella

10 " Let's take a walk. You can show me some of your memories and I'll show you some of mine. "

― Adam Berlin , Number of Missing

11 " I turn the water all the way hot, turn my back to the water, and I take it. I close my eyes and I'm on the hundredth floor with the jet-fuel fire at my back and the drop below. I take it and take it until I can't take it, until the heat takes over everything, and I jump, plummeting to the street
I'm out of the shower.
I turn my back to the mirror and look at the too-red skin behind my shoulder blades. The wind blows north and the smoke is here. Then the wind shifts and you can't smell a thing. Then the wind shifts again. Now you smell it, now you don't. "

― Adam Berlin , Number of Missing

12 " He can hit a man in the liver so the blood flow stops. It takes a full second before the pain registers and the man falls. I've seen Billy hook men's livers and punch at their hearts. I've seen him break a man's nose in the ring, shatter an eardrum, close an eye. I've seen him hit a man so hard, fist to jaw, the man seemed to fall asleep before he fell, his body so relaxed his face looked calm even when his head slammed against canvas. "

― Adam Berlin , Both Members of the Club: A Novella

13 " and if the other man falls,
and not just any man
but a man also trained to take it,
they’re done, they’ve won
the purest win
and that’s what they’re dreaming,
these men in the back rooms
of The Blue Horizon "

― Adam Berlin , The Standing Eight