George Pelecanos

He knew what he wanted. He wanted some money. He wanted a piece of ass. He wanted a big dinner, with all the trimmings. He wanted a bottle of whiskey. He wanted a car, in which he could drive a hundred miles an hour (he had only recently learned how to drive, and he loved the feelings of speed and control, the sharpness of the danger).

Everything is a dream. Nothing hangs together. You move from one dream to another and there is no reason for the change.

Your eyes see things and your ears hear, but nothing has any reason behind it. It would be easier to believe in God.

You know enough to know how you feel is senseless, but you don’t know enough to know why.

He had them, and he didn’t want to be without them, but they didn’t work. They didn’t make him feel better. They just helped him stay alive.

Because to think any other way was to hope, and he hoped he had given up hope.

They want to make everything gray and tasteful. Don’t they understand how awful good taste seems to people who don’t have it?

There would be no cast-off, shitty toys for Billy, no empty nights with no one to be comforted by; on the other hand there would be tears, injustice, cuffings, yellings-at, and discipline. But the boy would know deep inside that it was done with love by a human being, not abstractly by a machine.

marriage was not an institution, not even an idea, but a rational social process whose function was to raise children properly.