Home > Author > Michael Marshall Smith

Michael Marshall Smith QUOTES

Michael Marshall Smith QUOTES

1 " I once met a woman who'd been in therapy... and it seemed like the big thing she'd learned was to ignore everything she thought in the first hour of the day. That's when the negative stuff will try to bring you down, she said, and she was right about that but not much else. You come back from the night with your head and your soul empty, and bad things try to fill you up. There's a lot to get exercised about, if you let it. But if you've got a task, something to fill your head and move your limbs, by the time you've finished it the day has begun ands you're onto the next thing. You're over the hump, like I said. "

― Michael Marshall Smith

2 " I shut my eyes, turned away for a moment, and it came: a shiver of finality like the one when you decide, in your own mind, that you’re going to have to tell someone who loves you that you don’t want to be with them anymore. Terror, and relief; relief and terror, so intermingled that they feel like the same thought. "

― Michael Marshall Smith , Spares

3 " There are times when life seems like a struggle where the only reward you get for hanging on is the chance to struggle some more. "

― Michael Marshall Smith , One of Us

4 " Cross-legged on the floor, you drink, hoping each mouthful will hurt; occasional flurries of spastic movement as you try to work out what to do with your hands. When everyone else is gone, your world is just a tiny box with the walls pressing in. Messages on the phone you can't bear to play, much less listen to, and nothing in the apartment that you can recognize as meaningfully yours. "

― Michael Marshall Smith , One of Us

5 " and only when that happens do you realise just how much silence there really is. Silence between lovers, when something really needs to be said; silence from a parent when a child needs some word more than anything else in the world; silences and in betweens and everything which isn’t an answer. "

― Michael Marshall Smith , Spares

6 " I guess, like some guy once said, if triangles invented a god, the chances are high it would have three sides. "

― Michael Marshall Smith , One of Us

7 " Storyboarded by the West Coast’s finest, the ceiling celebrated the exploits of that most durable of action heroes—God. "

― Michael Marshall Smith , Spares

8 " You have to accept gifts occasionally, because there are some things you can’t give yourself "

― Michael Marshall Smith , Spares

9 " You love because you want to need someone the way you did when you were a child, and have them need you too. You eat well because the intensity of taste reminds you of a need satisfied, a pain relieved. The finest paintings are nothing more than the red head of a flower, nodding in the breeze, when you were two years old; the most exciting film is just the way everything was, back in the days when you stared goggle-eyed at the whirling chaos all around you. All these things do is get the adult to shut up for a while, to open for just a moment a tiny sliding window in the cell deep inside, letting the pallid child peep hungrily out and drink the world in before darkness falls again. "

― Michael Marshall Smith , Only Forward

10 " When you're born a light is switched on, a light which shines up through your life. As you get older the light still reaches you, sparkling as it comes up through your memories. And if you're lucky as you travel forward through time, you'll bring the whole of yourself along with you, gathering your skirts and leaving nothing behind, nothing to obscure the light. But if a Bad Thing happens part of you is seared into place, and trapped for ever at that time. The rest of you moves onward, dealing with all the todays and tomorrows, but something, some part of you, is left behind. That part blocks the light, colours the rest of your life, but worse than that, it's alive. Trapped for ever at that moment, and alone in the dark, that part of you is still alive. "

― Michael Marshall Smith , Only Forward

11 " When you’re a child the world forbears you, allows you your flights of imagination, your feelings of specialness. But sooner or later the privileges are withdrawn, and all you’re left with is a stunned bitterness at the realisation that you’re just the same as everybody else. "

― Michael Marshall Smith , Only Forward

12 " You haven't seen untidiness until you've seen a room where gravity has failed twice in different directions. "

― Michael Marshall Smith , Only Forward

13 " It's simply the way things are when people come together out of hurt rather than happiness. When you try to use people as band-aids you merely reinfect the wound, and every moment you spend with them is like a speck of glass working itself deeper into your flesh. "

― Michael Marshall Smith , What You Make It

14 " Everything you've done, everything you've seen, everything you've become, remains. You never can go back, only forward, and if you don't bring the whole of yourself with you, you'll never see the sun again, "

― Michael Marshall Smith , Only Forward

15 " The realest and scariest monsters are internal demons, the specters of regret and guilt and lack of fulfillment, awareness of the entropic end of love, or the first shivers occasioned by the realization of our own ageing, and the eventual inevitability of death. "

― Michael Marshall Smith , Everything You Need

16 " The angel we named God banned representations of himself, even the writing of his name, trying to halt the process of literalization—but in the end it became inevitable. The angel found himself at the head of a corporation, run by Young Turks who wouldn't respect the line management structure: They rewrote his memos to make the law more rigorous, more confined, more human. He got ousted in a boardroom coup and kicked upstairs. He hadn't realized the power of corporeality, that the minds of men would of necessity alter the mind of their God. Being a deity meant taking on a lot of your subjects' qualities—both profound and trivial. "

― Michael Marshall Smith , One of Us

17 " Everything feels like a badly designed computer game in which you fall into a pit that doesn't kill you but from which there's absolutely no escape. For a while you kick against the walls, but the walls get higher no matter how hard and fast you press all the buttons you can find. And sooner or later you'll realize there's one you haven't tried yet. The power switch.[...] So she began reaching for the button herself, but she never tried quite hard enough, because some part of her was still alive. She didn't want to throw the machine away. She just wanted to start again. "

― Michael Marshall Smith , One of Us

18 " Your story can change. Overnight. "

― Michael Marshall Smith , Hannah Green and Her Unfeasibly Mundane Existence

19 " Being me is not a fate everyone would enjoy. There are risks, and frequent disappointments. I'm not all that keen on the arrangement myself, to be honest. "

― Michael Marshall Smith , The Gist

20 " All non-smokers seem to live in the belief that smokers have wandered naively through life, bereft of the knowledge that their habit is extremely bad for them. "

― Michael Marshall Smith , Only Forward