Booth Bones Quotes

We are important and our lives are important, magnificent really, and their details are worthy to be recorded. This is how writers must think, this is how we must sit down with pen in hand. We were here; we are human beings; this is how we lived. Let it be known, the earth passed before us. Our details are important. Otherwise, if they are not, we can drop a bomb and it doesn't matter. . . Recording the details of our lives is a stance against bombs with their mass ability to kill, against too much speed and efficiency. A writer must say yes to life, to all of life: the water glasses, the Kemp's half-and-half, the ketchup on the counter. It is not a writer's task to say, "It is dumb to live in a small town or to eat in a café when you can eat macrobiotic at home." Our task is to say a holy yes to the real things of our life as they exist – the real truth of who we are: several pounds overweight, the gray, cold street outside, the Christmas tinsel in the showcase, the Jewish writer in the orange booth across from her blond friend who has black children. We must become writers who accept things as they are, come to love the details, and step forward with a yes on our lips so there can be no more noes in the world, noes that invalidate life and stop these details from continuing.

Forest Gump had it wrong. Life is not a box of chocolate; it's a kaleidoscope. In the flip of a wrist, realities are shredded and the world takes on a totally new shape.

Everyone who loves risks losing their heart every minute of every day.

Yo cuidaré de ti y tú nos ayudarás, como Booth y Bones.-Cahal a Mizar

My rhythm was joined with that of the Mississippi seasons. To change would shift everything inside of me...

The ritual worked. That is the most ghastly thing. I hold no particular brief for the rationality of the world, but that this vile obscenity should actually have the power to bring back the dead seems to me not merely a sign that the world is not rational, but that it is in fact entirely insane, a murderous lunatic gibbering in the corner of a padded cell.

Blue, largely against her will, glanced to the booth he pointed to. Three boys sat at it: one was smudgy, just as he said, with a rumpled, faded look about his person, like his body had been laundered too many times. The one who'd hit the light was handsome and his head was shaved; a soldier in a war where the enemy was everyone else. And the third was -- elegant. It was not the right word for him, but it was close. He was fine boned and a little fragile looking, with blue eyes pretty enough for a girl.

Tell me, Sarah Booth, is it your body that's hurt or your heart?" "Whatever it is, it'll mend.

Home is where they have to accept you.

I want to make love to you. Will you let me?

Ivo sat and listened, the look in his blue eyes enrapt and I knew, though I could hardly believe it, that he was not bored or uninterested, that to him I mattered as I had never mattered to anyone in my life.

Loving the unattainable was safe. That love could never be tested by day-to-day reality.

I do not like children. I do not know how to speak to them. They frightened and confused me when I was a child myself, and they frighten and confuse me now that I am an adult.

Her soul is a brightly burning campfire, its warmth pushing into my bones and chasing away the cold traces of my insecurity.

Gentle reader, allow me to introduce Kyle Murchison Booth. You will forgive him if he does not shake hands.

He rolled the syllables of my name out of his mouth as if they were at once contemptible and marvelous.

I could see her blush, even through her tan, but her eyes were steady and unapologetic.

The museum may lose things,” I said, “but it never throws them away.

He touched my face; I could feel the heat of his fingers, and this time I did not flinch away, although I was trembling.

A room more clearly meant to delight the heart of a bibliophile I could not imagine.

I did not know how to help her; I was not the hero for whom she waited, the man whose touch could dissolve the wall around her and set her free.

The hotel was a blazing citadel, a palace of electricity in the city’s cold gloom.

The picture that emerged from Mildred’s entries was of a pretty, charming, willful child who was accustomed to get her own way with the confidence of an empress.

As she became more honest with herself, her writing matured, so that one could catch glimpses of what would emerge from its chrysalis as a poet’s genius.

This was merely the malignant hand of coincidence.

Like many predators, boys hunt in packs.

Asking why the creature had chosen to give me its bone was pointless. My foolish and unwilling foray into necromancy had made me attractive to such things, as a magnetic is attractive to iron.

At home, it was part of my life that Ivo was always watching me, unblinking, the slits of his pupils expanding and contracting as a cat’s do when it considers whether or not to pounce on its prey.

I had neither proof nor explanation, only that mad inner surety that I suspect is characteristic of all those who hear voices in an empty room, whether those voices be spectral or merely delusional.

The quality of light just before dusk on a clear winter day is loaded with poignancy. My mother had called it “the blue hour,” when melancholy slips into a room unnoticed and touches everything with a sprinkling of pain.

That's one thing I like about you, Sarah Booth. You put your own personal style on a room. I'd call this boudoir pigsty. Yes sir, any man would find this an enticin' little love nest, if he didn't break his neck tryin' to get to the bed.

I suppose she was pretty-at least everyone seemed to think so-but her mouth was small and ungenerous, and her eyes was hard. Her voice was high-pitched and always rather breathless, and she lisped slightly. The quality of her voice was childlike, innocent, and that was a deception worthy of the Serpent in Eden.

He walked like a conqueror, like a lion. He could not have been more than twenty-two or twenty-three. His eyes were not merely vivid blue; they were intense, blazing, as if they were lit from within, as if this young man was bringing a flame that no one else could feel. His mouth was twisted in a mocking smile. He had known I would look.

Amelia Stapleton had frozen herself in a kind artificial girlhood which apparently resonated with the ghost of Georgiana Truelove. In fact, I saw a dreadful symmetry between the two: both of them unable to grow up, both of them preserved like insects in amber at this point of trauma, where their lives ended-Miss Stapleton’s only metaphorically, but Georgiana Truelove’s with a most dreadful literality.

I heard the clicking of hells, like the tapping of tiny hooves, and there appeared in front of me two, tiny withered crones. I thought I had to be dreaming still, for they were identical, dressed in the same dark red, with small, black, cunning eyes in their pale, wrinkled faces. They looked as if they put up their silvery-white hair in its coiled braids using each other as a mirror, and there were long, dangling earrings of marcasite and jet.

Look! when I am in a drawing room, a church, a station; on the terrasse of a cafe, at the theatre or wherever crowds pass or loiter, I enjoy considering faces from a strictly homicidal point of view. For you may see by the glance, by the back of the neck, the shape of the skull, the jaw bone and zygoma of the cheeks, or by some part of their persons that they bear the stigmata of that psychological calamity known as murder. It is scarcely an aberration of my mind, but I can go nowhere without seeing it flickering beneath eyelids, or without feeling its mysterious contact in the touch of every hand held out to me. Last Sunday I went to a town on the festival day of its patron saint. In the public square, which was decorated with foliage, floral arches, and poles draped with flags, was grouped every kind of amusement common to that sort of public celebration—And beneath the paternal eye of the authorities, a swarm of good people were enjoying themselves. The wooden horses, the roller-coaster and the swings drew a very meagre crowd. The organs wheezed their gayest tunes and most bewitching overtures in vain. Other pleasures absorbed this festive throng. Some shot with rifles, pistols, or the good old crossbow at targets painted like human faces; others hurled balls, knocking over marionettes ranged pathetically on wooden bars. Still others, mallet in hand, pounded upon a spring which animated a French sailor who patriotically transfixed with his bayonet a poor hova or a mocking Dahomean. Everywhere, under tents or in the little lighted booths, I saw counterfeits of death, parodies of massacre, portrayals of hecatombs. And how happy these good people were!

Steele yanked on the pistol, but the front sight got snagged on the Frenchman’s belt. Jean-Luc’s right arm hit him in the wrist, a painful bone-on-bone collision that wrenched the Five-seven out of his grip. Steele could make out Burrows’s bodyguard posted up ahead, faithfully guarding his boss’s booth. Jean-Luc shouted a warning while trying to dodge the server who seemed to appear out of nowhere. The bodyguard turned to his left, reached into his jacket, and squared up to the threat. Steele’s instincts told him that he was too far behind the eight-ball to get the MP9 into action fast, so he improvised. He launched a kick at Jean-Luc’s ankle that would have made an NFL punter proud. His leg muscles pistoned his foot toward its target like a hot rod on a quarter-mile track. The impact snapped the fleeing Frenchman’s puny ankle, causing him to tumble into the server. Now.

this thing—his thing—still well and alive inside me. # I dreamed of clawed hooks and sexual abandon. Faces covered in leather masks and eyeliner so dark I could only see black. Here the monsters would come alive, but not the kind you have come to expect. I watched myself as if I were outside my own flesh, free from the imprisonment of bone and conscience. Swollen belly stretch-marked and ugly; my hair tethered and my skin vulnerable. Earthquake beats blared from the DJ booth as terrible looking bodies thrashed, moshed and convulsed. Alone, so alone. Peter definitely gone, no more tears left but the ones that were to come from agony. She was above me again, Dark Princess, raging beauty queen, and I was hers to control. The ultimate succession into human suspension. Like I’d already learned: the body is the final canvas. There is no difference between love and pain. They are the same hopeless obsession. The hooks dived, my legs opened and my back arched. Blood misted my face; pussy juice slicked my inner thigh as my water suddenly broke. # The next night I had to get to the club. 4 A.M. is a time that never lets me down; it knows why I have nightmares, and why I want to suspend myself above them. L train lunacies berated me once again, but this time I noticed the people as if under a different light. They were all rather sad, gaunt and bleary. Their faces were to be pitied and their hands kept shaking, their legs jittering for another quick fix. No matter how much the deranged governments of New York City have cleaned up the boroughs, they can’t rid us of our flavor. The Meatpacking District was scarily alive. Darkness laced with sizzling urban neon. Regret stitched up in the night like a black silk blanket. The High Line Park gloomed above me with trespassers and graffiti maestros. I was envious of their creative freedom, their passion, and their drive. They had to do what they were doing, had to create. There was just no other acceptable life than that. I was inside fast, my memories of Peter fleeting and the ache within me about to be cast off. Stage left, stage right, it didn’t matter. I passed the first check point with ease, as if they already knew the click of my heels, the way my protruding stomach curved through my lace cardigan. She found me, or I found her, and we didn’t exchange any words, any warnings. It was time. Face up, legs open, and this time I’d be flying like Superman, but upside down. There were many hands, many faces, but no

Tinkie had insisted on, and paid for, the frosted-glass door that said Delaney Detective Agency. Classic noir. The only classy thing about our digs.

If you can find the cause for Oscar’s illness, I’ll forgive the mortgage on Dahlia House. I’ll pay it off myself.

In that short time I’d saved Dahlia House from the developers, found a stray dog that turned out to be a real treasure, obtained the best partner in the world, and been gifted with a horse from my friend Lee McBride.

Some things demand that you search for them, even though you will not find them.

Sometimes, you just have to walk away and never look back.

I got a few curious glances from some of the girls as I headed over to the DJ booth. As I neared, the DJ looked up with a friendly smile. Dan was a big-boned guy with a crew-cut and he looked like a suburban dad who’d cheer for his kids at their soccer game.

The deliberate effort of memory for small detail is a social grace that will take a person far.

Pain and joy are inseparable. Without love there wouldn't be the blues.

Where is Wildene?" "Just step out the door and holler "Sooie! Sooie! She's a ho hog if ever I saw one. She'll come running.

Boopsy's Boutique catered to the woman, or man, with money and lots of it. Date dresses ran upward of a thousand dollars, and some of the high-end designer frocks touched five figures. The dresses were exquisite, emblazoned with crystals and pearls, complete with jewel-encrusted shoes to match. Needless to say, it wasn't a place I frequented.

Tinkie's on the list." "That's ridiculous. She and Enzo were only flirting." "And Oscar showed his ass and then was seen floundering in the bayou where a blow-up sex doll, complete with a death threat, later showed up in front of an entire town."... "Even though they don't have a body, Pret is thinking Enzo's disappearance may prove to be a homicide.

She's smart and a hard worker." "And?" "A little on the crazy side." Cece inhaled with resignation. "I was overjoyed when the district elected a woman, but Rebecca's half a bubble off plumb.

My Christmas tree glimmered with lights, ornaments, and tinsel. Though such holiday trimmings weren't in vogue any longer, I loved them. I pulled every box of family decorations from the attic and glamored the tree until it looked like a "fancy woman in a cheap brothel" as my aunt Loulane would say.

The room looked exactly as it had looked when I left the Siddons house for good at the age of eighteen, as if the intervening years had never happened, as if my escape had been nothing but a dream.

I thought of the boy I had been, his murderous, pent-up hatred, of his strange, silent green glass maelstorm of wrath.

I slide out of the booth, the diner, into the heat of the afternoon hating with every inch of my bones the so-called free country I live in, the home of the brave.

Josh snorted. Then he nudged me, nodding to a girl in a skirt way too short for her, teetering in heels on her way back from the bathroom. I laughed. “Look at the guy she’s with. He’s resource guarding. Growling over her like a dog with a bone. He’s eyeing every man that comes within ten feet of her.” Josh chuckled. “Want me to test your theory? Pretend like I’m gonna try and talk to her?” His eyes twinkled. “Oh my God, yes. Please.” He set his beer down and slid from the booth, and I watched, grinning, as he made his way over to the bar, shooting me a wolfish look over his shoulder. When he got close, Dog Bone Guy puffed his chest and wrapped an arm across his girl’s boobs. Josh veered left, laughing. I put a hand over my smile. His boyish charm always got me. He was adorable. He made his way back to our table and scooted in next to me, putting an arm around me. “You were right.” “That was fucking hilarious.” I giggled, leaning into him. His eyes gleamed and he drew his lower lip between his teeth, looking down at my smiling mouth. And like it was no big deal, like there weren’t any rules, as if we were a couple just out on a date, having a good time, he leaned in and kissed me. And I let him.

I felt as if I walked inside a cold shadow, a shadow cast by bricks and mortar.

Old incompetence is incompetence still.

Dinner was surprisingly pleasant. Ratcliffe’s friends did not know what to make of his sponsorship of me, but he said something about archaeology and museums, and they fell over themselves in their anxiety not to hear anything more. When none of them were watching, Ratcliffe winked at me.

The great edifice of the Belfontaine Hotel loomed up out of the darkness and spitting snow and swallowed me whole, like a giant in a fairytale swallowing a fool.

At dinner, Mr. Marten produced his elegant place cards and assigned us places with the arbitrary ruthlessness of a dictator.

My voice was deeper than his, husky and rasping, like the caw of a crow.

that we found your business card,’ Ryder continued. He made business card sound dirty too, as if it was one of the ones you saw pinned up in public phone booths

…Always believe in miracles, Sarah Booth.

He began to laugh again, a croaking, rasping vile sound that made me want to stop my ears with my fingers.

Where I remembered a weedy, sniffling rat of a boy, here was a small, spare dry man with fierce bright eyes like those of a hunting hawk.