2
" Sometimes it's possible, just barely possible, to imagine a version of this world different from the existing one, a world in which there is true justice, heroic honesty, a clear perception possessed by each individual about how to treat all the others. Sometimes I swear I could see it, glittering in the pavement, glowing between the words in a stranger's sentence, a green, impossible vision--the world as it was meant to be, like a mist around the world as it is. "
― Ben H. Winters , Underground Airlines
4
" Freedman Town serves a good purpose - not for the people who live there, Lord knows; people stuck there by poverty, by prejudice, by laws that keep them from moving or working. Freedman Town's purpose is for the rest of the world. The world that sits, like Martha, with dark glasses on, staring from a distance, scared but safe. Create a pen like that, give people no choice but to live like animals, and then people get to point at them and say 'Will you look at those animals? That's what kind of people those people are'. "
― Ben H. Winters , Underground Airlines
6
" Because as any writer will tell you, an IDEA for a book is like falling in love, it’s all wild emotion and headlong rush, but the ACTUAL ACT of writing a book is like building a relationship: it is joyous, slow, fragile, frustrating, exhilarating, painstaking, exhausting, worth it. "
― Ben H. Winters , The Last Policeman (The Last Policeman, #1)
10
" In Dimond Library, on the way to the basement stairs, I see a pale boy hunched over a desk in the carrel, sipping from a Styrofoam cup, surrounded by books, reading. His face is gaunt and his hair a greasy mess. On the ground beside him is a clotted leaking pile of discarded teabags and beside him a bucket that I realize with horror is full of urine. There's a tall stack of books on one side of him and a taller stack on the other: out pile, in pile. I stand for a second watching this guy, frozen in place but alive with small action: muttering to himself as he reads, almost humming like an electric motor, his hands twitching at the edges of the pages, until with a sudden flash of motion, he turns the page, flings it over like he can't consume the words fast enough.
"Come on," says Nico, and we continue down the hall, passing four more of these carrels, each with its quiet, intent occupant-- earnestly, frantically reading. "
― Ben H. Winters , Countdown City (The Last Policeman, #2)
17
" He books it into that little playground there. I mean the guy is zooming like the Road Runner, skidding through the gravel and the slush and everything. I’m yelling, “Police, police! Stop, motherfucker!”
‘You do not yell, “Stop, motherfucker.”’
‘I do. Because you know, Palace, this is it. This is the last chance I get to run after a perp yelling, “Stop, motherfucker. "
― Ben H. Winters , The Last Policeman (The Last Policeman, #1)
18
" Now I see things differently. It took me some time, but I know the secret now. Freedman Town serves a good purpose -- not for the people who live there, Lord knows; people stuck there by poverty, by prejudice, by laws that keep them from moving or working. Freedman Town's purpose is for the rest of the world. The world that sits, like Martha, with dark glasses on, staring from a distance, scared but safe. Create a pen like that, give people no choice but to live like animals, and then people get to point at them and say 'Will you look at those animals? That's what kind of people those people are.' And that idea drifts up and out of Freedman Town like chimney smoke, black gets to mean poor and poor to mean dangerous and all the words get murked together and become one dark idea, a cloud of smoke, the smokestack fumes drifting like filthy air across the rest of the nation. "
― Ben H. Winters , Underground Airlines
