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The Short Drop (Gibson Vaughn, #1) QUOTES

The Short Drop (Gibson Vaughn, #1) QUOTES

1 " Hope is a cancer. One of two things happens. Either you never learn the truth, in which case it gnaws down to the bone until there's nothing left, or worse, you do, and you go through that windshield at ninety because hope told you it was okay to make the drive without a seat belt. "

― Matthew FitzSimmons , The Short Drop (Gibson Vaughn, #1)

2 " Albert Camus’s The Stranger, which he’d found revelatory at nineteen. An ancient copy of Don DeLillo’s Great Jones Street had been a "

― Matthew FitzSimmons , The Short Drop (Gibson Vaughn, #1)

3 " Dan Hendricks, her partner, was a top-notch surveillance man. He’d broken into Gibson’s apartment a week ago and wired it in ninety minutes flat. Motion-activated infrared cameras, bugs, the works. It gave them uninterrupted video coverage of the entire apartment, and the starkness of Gibson’s living conditions was informative. "

― Matthew FitzSimmons , The Short Drop (Gibson Vaughn, #1)

4 " If you don’t have anything nice to say, take a big bite and chew slow. "

― Matthew FitzSimmons , The Short Drop (Gibson Vaughn, #1)

5 " Google’s no substitute for knowing things. Write that down. "

― Matthew FitzSimmons , The Short Drop (Gibson Vaughn, #1)

6 " Hope is a cancer. One of two things happens. Either you never learn the truth, in which case it gnaws down to the bone until there’s nothing left, or worse, you do, and you go through that windshield at ninety because hope told you it was okay to make the drive without a seat belt. "

― Matthew FitzSimmons , The Short Drop (Gibson Vaughn, #1)

7 " Time was the great leveler, and neither money nor power held sway over its relentless march. "

― Matthew FitzSimmons , The Short Drop (Gibson Vaughn, #1)

8 " There was an old joke—it’s not the fall that kills you but the abrupt stop. "

― Matthew FitzSimmons , The Short Drop (Gibson Vaughn, #1)

9 " Politics is an ugly picture with a pretty frame. "

― Matthew FitzSimmons , The Short Drop (Gibson Vaughn, #1)

10 " Anyway, the trick is seeing what they’re trying to hide. What are they trying to draw your eye away from? Figure that out, and you figure out the man. Or woman. But start with men, because they’re easier. Women are more of a PhD thing. "

― Matthew FitzSimmons , The Short Drop (Gibson Vaughn, #1)

11 " Entitlement breeds laziness, which in turn breeds decline. But of course with enough money, it is possible not to notice for decades that your family name is gathering dust. "

― Matthew FitzSimmons , The Short Drop (Gibson Vaughn, #1)

12 " What was the first rule to getting someone to fall in line? Figure out what they need and give them a taste. Not enough to sate them, but enough to whet their appetite. Enough that they wanted more. Needed more. "

― Matthew FitzSimmons , The Short Drop (Gibson Vaughn, #1)

13 " there are kings and there are kingmakers. Regardless of what populist history might argue, you rarely have one without the other. "

― Matthew FitzSimmons , The Short Drop (Gibson Vaughn, #1)

14 " It’s at the edge where the truth lies. It’s like hair. Everyone brushes their hair so it looks good from straight on. Why? Because that’s how we see it in the mirror. Straight on. We only ever see ourselves straight on, so that’s the only angle we worry about. "

― Matthew FitzSimmons , The Short Drop (Gibson Vaughn, #1)

15 " What happens next?” Gibson found he was curious too. They finished The Return of the King two years later, and in the process, Gibson became a reader. Something "

― Matthew FitzSimmons , The Short Drop (Gibson Vaughn, #1)

16 " This is the short drop,” the man said. “You’ll notice that, unlike the standard drop or the long drop, your neck is not broken. Which may seem like a blessing now, but in the end you will wish it had been a longer drop and a shorter wait. But that’s the good news and bad news of the short drop. You live longer, but . . . you live longer. Most people think they’d always want to live longer, but twenty minutes at the end of a rope is a long time to die. A long time to regret things that cannot be changed and that no longer matter. "

― Matthew FitzSimmons , The Short Drop (Gibson Vaughn, #1)

17 " You couldn’t allow your past to define you. "

― Matthew FitzSimmons , The Short Drop (Gibson Vaughn, #1)

18 " A memory swam up from the depths, its hideous, reptilian spine almost breaking the surface before it swam powerfully away from him. "

― Matthew FitzSimmons , The Short Drop (Gibson Vaughn, #1)

19 " His regret was cold and offered no comfort. Filled up with words that he wished he had spoken and the faces he wished he had spoken them to. "

― Matthew FitzSimmons , The Short Drop (Gibson Vaughn, #1)

20 " In the immortal words of Duke Vaughn, “If you don’t have anything nice to say, take a big bite and chew slow. "

― Matthew FitzSimmons , The Short Drop (Gibson Vaughn, #1)