Holly Gibney Quotes

When an old man dies, a library burns.

Films are ephemeral, while books—the good ones—are eternal, or close to it.

Henry Thoreau said that we don’t own things; things own us. Every new object—whether it’s a home, a car, a television, or a fancy phone like that one—is something more we must carry on our backs.

The universe is large, he thought. It contains multitudes. It also contains me, and in this moment I am wonderful. I have a right to be wonderful.

Youth is a wonderful thing,” said Mr. Harrigan. “What a shame it’s wasted on children.

And what makes you think you’re a main character in anything but your own mind?

Gifts are fragile. You must never entrust yours to people who might break it.

...I will live my life until my life runs out. I am wonderful, I deserve to be wonderful, and I contain multitudes.

Just when you think you’ve seen the worst human beings have to offer, you find out you’re wrong,

She smiles. She dies. A world of words dies with her.

Love is a gift; love is also a chain with a manacle at each end.

Sometimes the universe throws you a rope. If it does, climb it. See what's at the top.

My grandmother used to say a person shouldn’t call out unless they want an answer. I’ve always thought that was good advice.

Forty is when you have to stop kidding yourself that you’re still a young anything.

I hate it when real events screw with my fiction, but that happens from time to time.

I believe you hear a click, not in your head but in your soul, when you find the place where you belong. You can ignore it, but really, why would you?

I am large, I contain multitudes’?

We don't own things. Things own us.

What you don’t want to do is what must be done first. Then it’s out of the way.

Reality was deep, and it was far. It held many secrets and went on forever.

Free samples are fine, but if you give people too much for-free, whether it’s clothes or food or information, they come to expect it.

The human brain is finite—no more than a sponge of tissue inside a cage of bone—but the mind within the brain is infinite. Its storage capacity is colossal, its imaginative reach beyond our ability to comprehend. I think when a man or woman dies, a whole world falls to ruin—the world that person knew and believed in. Think of that, kiddo—billions of people on earth, and each one of those billions with a world inside. The earth their minds have conceived.

I think we mostly live alone. By choice, like him, or just because that’s the way the world was made.

Mr. Harrigan also promised this, but I suppose men who understand business also understand that promises are easy to discard, being as how giving them is free.

holder-onners are never able to understand let-goers. They are tribes that just can’t understand each other.

No Miss America, but she was a prom queen back in high school. And nobody dumped a bucket of blood on her, either.

I think our phones are how we are wedded to the world. If so, it’s probably a bad marriage.

Which is what most of our modern communications amount to, when you stop to think of it; chatter for the sake of chatter.

Because there really is a second world. It exists because people refuse to believe it’s there.

Business is like football, Craig. If you have to knock someone down to reach the goal line, you better damn well do it, or you shouldn’t put on a uniform and go out on the field in the first place.

Nothing was eternal, except maybe for the mind of God, and even at thirteen I had my doubts about that.

If they give you ruled paper, write the other way.

But fascination is fear’s twin brother,

You can’t have everything, she thinks; into every life a little poop must fall. But sometimes you do get what you need. Which is really all a sane person can ask for.

The Life of Chuck: I am wonderful, I deserve to be wonderful, and I contain multitudes.

It’s from Balzac. ‘Behind every great fortune there is a crime.’ That was the theme I saw, even though the fortune ran through his fingers long before he was shot down in Cicero.

You have to start taking care of yourself when you’re forty. You have to maintain the machinery, because there’s no trade-in option.

Here is another relationship chilled by the fast-talking man in the red tie. It’s not fate and not coincidence

One last thing. End of Watch is fiction, but the high rate of suicides—both in the United States and in many other countries where my books are read—is all too real. The National Suicide Prevention Hotline number given in this book is also real. It’s 1-800-273-TALK. If you are feeling poopy (as Holly Gibney would say), give them a call. Because things can get better, and if you give them a chance, they usually do. Stephen

As that August burned away, I sometimes thought of an African proverb I’d read in one of my classes: When an old man dies, a library burns.

The older she gets, the more the resilience of the young amazes her.

The work matters. Nothing else. Not prizes. Not being published. Not being rich, famous, or both. Only the work.

He felt feverish and a little sick to his stomach. How could a normal man in the twenty-first century accept a shape-shifting monster? If you believed in Holly Gibney’s outsider, her El Cuco, then everything was on the table. No end to the universe.

It’s like you taught me to smoke marijuana and enjoy it, and now you’re saying, ‘If you like pot, you’ll really like heroin.

He said one of the reasons the stock market tanked so bad back in 1929 was because the more people traded, the farther behind the tickers got.

Promises are easily broken because they are free to give.

It’s liking that got lost, and love without liking is like a chain with a manacle at each end.

there’s no more exquisite torture than hope.

my mother died of that fake flu, you gullible bitch.

holder-onners are never able to understand let-goers. They are tribes that just can’t understand each other. Sort of like vaxxers and anti-vaxxers, Trumpers and Never Trumpers.

does anyone ever get complete closure? Especially from a parent?

fascination is fear’s twin brother,

. . . or how Terry Maitland could have been in two places at the same time. He kept coming up against those things; they were like pebbles lodged in his throat.

It’s a dream, Drew thought. Another dream, got to be. In no version of reality could a man be lawyered at by a rodent.

I thought immediately—and guiltily—of the call I’d made to Mr. Harrigan’s phone. I told myself he was dead and couldn’t have had anything to do with it.

Why God would let it be this way. It’s a mystery? You’re the hotshot philosophy guy and that’s the best you can do?” Yes, because death brings philosophy to ruin, Doug thinks.

Old age is a time of casting away, which is bad enough, but it’s also a time of escalating indignities.

They watch TV and have their dessert, spooning up a mixture of raspberry sorbet and Peter Steinman’s brains.

Death takes the best of us and death takes the rest of us.

When you grew up in a no-stoplight, dirt-road town like Harlow, the outside world was a strange and tempting place, and you longed to touch it in a way network TV couldn’t match.

I love you, Mom,” Holly says, and ends the call. Is that true? Yes. It’s liking that got lost, and love without liking is like a chain with a manacle at each end.

She checked her Fitbit again and saw her pulse was now up to one-twenty. She chugged down the rest of her latte, anyway. Living dangerously.

You can't have everything, she thinks; into every life a little poop must fall.

There. I’ve not only given advice, I’ve made a speech. Old age is insidious.

The world is going down the drain, and all we can say is ‘that sucks.

reader is a carrier, not a creator.

you think there are more like him?” After Texas, Holly would have said no. Now she cannot be sure. One is a unique number. When you have two, you may be seeing the beginning of a pattern.

It’s a Wonderful Life has always made her uneasy. She can relate to George Bailey at the beginning of the film, but by the end he strikes her as someone with a serious bipolar condition who’s arrived at the manic part of his cycle. She has even wondered if, after the movie ends, he creeps out of bed and murders his whole family.

Drew didn’t know where old man Prescott had gotten the small army of gun thugs he was counting on to keep that move from happening, but he was sure it would come to him eventually. Everything was eventual.

ELIZABETH SIROIS WHARTON, 87, passed away peacefully on May 29, 2010, at Warsaw County Memorial Hospital. She was born on January 19, 1923, the son of Marcel and Catherine Sirois. She is survived by her brother, Henry Sirois, her sister, Charlotte Gibney, her niece, Holly Gibney, and her daughter, Janelle Patterson. Elizabeth was predeceased by her husband, Alvin Wharton, and her beloved daughter, Olivia. Private visitation will be held from 10 AM to 1 PM at Soames Funeral Home

The act of writing fiction or poetry has been compared to dreaming,” he told his students, “but I don’t think that’s entirely accurate. I think it’s more akin to hypnosis. The more you ritualize the preparation, the easier you’ll find it to enter that state.

love without liking is like a chain with a manacle at each end.

Everything was eventual.

especially after her mother told her—proudly—that she voted for Donald Trump (oough).

I believe you hear a click, not in your head but in your soul, when you find the place where you belong.

Well, if ghosts exist,” she said, “I’ll bet not all of them are holy.

Sometimes the universe throws you a rope.” —Bill Hodges

TRISTIS PUELLA.

God sometimes asks us to pay up front in this life, and you paid a high cost. From now on you are going to have a good life. A blessed life.

He’d like to be in a doctor’s office, waiting for a proctological exam. He would like to be anywhere but here.

an old man dies, a library burns.

The only person unhappier than a writer whose expectations aren’t fulfilled is one whose dreams come true.

You can't write well without a grasp of profanity and the ability to look at filth. To sometimes exalt filth.

It’s from Balzac. ‘Behind every great fortune there is a crime.

Be kind to one another, tender-hearted, forgiving each other, just as God in Christ also has forgiven you.

Charity is good for the soul, but it also gives a man power, and Mr. Harrigan used his on Dusty Bilodeau.

In the twenty-first century, I think our phones are how we are wedded to the world. If so, it’s probably a bad marriage.

You don’t answer a perp’s questions; the perp answers yours.

You know what they say, there are none so blind as those who will not see.

It was like a splinter, one lodged in his mind instead of under his skin.

There’s nothing else in the paper these days except Covid and people arguing about masks. Which is like people standing out in the rain and arguing about whether or not they’re getting wet.

I punched him on the shoulder and turned on the radio, going past WBLM (“Maine’s Rock and Roll Blimp”) to WTHT (“Maine’s #1 Country Station”). I had gotten a taste for c&w. I have never lost it.

Henry Thoreau said that we don’t own things; things own us. Every new object—whether it’s a home, a car, a television, or a fancy phone like that one—is something more we must carry on our backs

On her drive back to the city, Holly is nagged by the thought of her Dollar General underwear, bought new but unwashed, and it comes to her that her mother really isn’t dead after all and won’t be until Holly herself dies.

He also has only nine months to live, although he doesn’t know it yet. The seeds of his end—the place where life narrows to a final point—are planted deep, where no surgeon’s knife will ever go, and they have lately begun to awaken. Soon they will bear black fruit.

I learned that every addict knows two things: he can’t use and he must use. That’s the knot in your head, see? You can’t cut it and you can’t untie it, so you have to learn to rise above it. It can be done, but you have to remember the basic situation. You must but you can’t.

What you’re feeling . . . and I’m feeling . . . that’s normal. Reality is thin ice, but most people skate on it their whole lives and never fall through until the very end. We did fall through, but we helped each other out. We’re still helping each other.” You’re helping me more, Ralph thought. You may have your problems, Holly, but you’re better at this than I am. Far better. “And you’re all right?” he asked her. “I mean, really?” “Yes. Really. And you will be.” “Message received. Call me if you hear the ice cracking under your feet.” “Of course,” she said. “And you’ll do the same. It’s how we go on.” From

She’s bundled up in a parka even though it’s still in the mid-fifties at eight o’clock, because she’s down to a hundred and ten pounds (her doctor routinely scolds her about her weight) and she feels the cold. Even more than the cold, she feels the damp. Yet she stays, because there’s a poem to be had tonight, if she can just get her fingers under its lid and open it up.

It’s not, because black people can never be American in the same way Italian and Irish people can. Black skin withstands the melting pot. I want to say . . .” He pauses. “I want to say that discrimination is the father of crime. I want to say that Alton Robinson’s tragedy was that he thought that through crime he could achieve some sort of equality, and that turned out to be a chimera. In the end he wasn’t killed because he got crossways with Paulie Ricca, who was Capone’s successor, but because he was black.

Holly has been a movie buff all her life and has found things to enjoy even in films the critics have roasted (she believes, for example, that Stallone’s Cobra is woefully underestimated), but It’s a Wonderful Life has always made her uneasy. She can relate to George Bailey at the beginning of the film, but by the end he strikes her as someone with a serious bipolar condition who’s arrived at the manic part of his cycle. She has even wondered if, after the movie ends, he creeps out of bed and murders his whole family.