Holly Gibney Quotes

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

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

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

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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

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

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

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

there’s no more exquisite torture than hope.

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.

. . . 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.

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

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

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

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.

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.

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

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

TRISTIS PUELLA.

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

I’m a very curious person. Sometimes that gets me in trouble.” (Holly Gibney) “And sometimes it gets you out.” (Ralph Anderson)

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.

After breakfast, Holly returned to the guest room, supposedly to pack her things. Ralph suspected she was actually giving him time and privacy to say goodbye to his wife. She had her odd quirks, did Holly Gibney, but stupid she was not.

believes in the fake flu

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.

She was the love of my life. We had our disagreements, as married people do, but there’s a saying: ‘Don’t let the sun go down on your anger.’ And we never did.

Microwaving kills most nutrients, it’s a known fact. No

But love isn’t always support. Sometimes love is taking the supports away.

get off your ass and go knock on doors.

knows that’s not the way life works. Maybe just as well. If it did, happiness wouldn’t mean anything.

Fifty-two years is a hell of a long walk from the altar, let me tell you. And some of it’s stony. Now how can I help you?

she often thinks of a line from some old folk song: a handful of gimme and a mouthful of much obliged.

Deliciam meam amo. Lude cum matre tua. Mox domi ero. Pater tuus.

as pie de manzana.

The idea that the creative impulse is a way to get rid of poison…

Find a way. Find the images. No ideas but in things, but they must be the true things. When your eye and heart and mind are in harmony.

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

At twenty, the body forgives. At forty, forgiveness is provisional at best.

In Romans it says the weak person eats only vegetables. Deuteronomy, the Lord has promised you shall eat meat. Corinthians, eat whatever is sold in the meat market.

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.

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.

There’s half a bottle of red left from dinner.” “Wine before bed gives me acid. You know that.” But he follows her. “Just a splash.” She gets it from the fridge and pours—a splash for him, a bit more for her. They sit facing each other.

You believe that, Holly thinks. You believe it to your very soul, because you’re a holder-onner, and 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.

Most cases are fragile, the way eggs are fragile. Why? Because most criminals are dopes. When it comes to doing dirt, even the ones who are smart are dopes. Otherwise they wouldn’t do dirt in the first place. So you treat a case like an egg. You crack it, you beat it, you put it in a pan with some butter. Then you make yourself a nice little omelet.

Forty is when you have to stop kidding yourself that you’re still a young anything. If you don’t—if you subscribe to such self-actualizing bullshit as “forty is the new twenty-five”—you’re going to find yourself starting to slide. Just a little at first, but then a little more, and all at once you’re fifty with a belly poking out your belt buckle and cholesterol-busters in the medicine cabinet. At twenty, the body forgives. At forty, forgiveness is provisional at best.

This is not psychiatry,” Olivia says. “It is not therapy. It is poetry, my dear. The talent was there before awful things happened to you, it came with the original equipment just as your brother’s did, but talent is a dead engine. It runs on every unresolved experience—every unresolved trauma, if you like—in your life. Every conflict. Every mystery. Every deep part of your character you find not just unlikeable but loathsome.” One hand goes up and makes a fist. Barbara can tell it hurts Olivia to do that, but she does it anyway, closing her fingers tight, nails digging into the thin skin of her palm. “Keep it,” she says. “Keep it as long as you can. It’s your treasure. You will use it up and then you will have to rely on the memory of the ecstasy you once felt, but while you have it, keep it. Use it.

Sometimes the universe throws you a rope.

Just the Sheepherder’s Special,” she says. “A cup of ewe.

I think so. Of course I’m her mother, so what else would I say? No Miss America, but she was a prom queen back in high school. And nobody dumped a bucket of blood on her, either.

This is not psychiatry,” Olivia says. “It is not therapy. It is poetry, my dear. The talent was there before awful things happened to you, it came with the original equipment just as your brother’s did, but talent is a dead engine. It runs on every unresolved experience—every unresolved trauma, if you like—in your life. Every conflict. Every mystery. Every deep part of your character you find not just unlikeable but loathsome.

Flogging Molly’s “If Ever I Leave This World Alive” at the start; “Spirit in the Sky,” by Norman Greenbaum, at the end).

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

Leave the future out of it. The only person unhappier than a writer whose expectations aren’t fulfilled is one whose dreams come true.

company.

game show hosted by Allen Ludden, who went to his reward long ago. Looking around at the sparse

The talent was there before awful things happened to you, it came with the original equipment just as your brother’s did, but talent is a dead engine. It runs on every unresolved experience—every unresolved trauma, if you like—in your life. Every conflict. Every mystery. Every deep part of your character you find not just unlikeable but loathsome.

She may regret what she wrote later, but not now. Standing at the mailbox, bent over with her wet hair hanging in her face, she knows it’s the truth. The work matters. Nothing else. Not prizes. Not being published. Not being rich, famous, or both. Only the work.

She dies. A world of words dies with her.

It’s the truth. She’s curious about everything. It’s how she rolls.

She walks home in a daze, thinking of the last thing Olivia said to her. “Gifts are fragile. You must never entrust yours to people who might break it.

She also took her pills. When she was working, she felt bright and aware. When she wasn’t, that sense of living in a cellophane bag returned.

What she felt most of all on the day when Bill sat down next to her behind a funeral parlor she could not bring herself to enter, was the sense that she had lost something vital; not just a purse or a credit card, but the life she could have led if things had been just a little different, or if God had seen fit to put just a little more of some important chemical in her system.

If you want to scream, now would be a good time. I’d do it myself, but I no longer have the lungpower.

This is not psychiatry,” Olivia says. “It is not therapy. It is poetry, my dear. The talent was there before awful things happened to you, it came with the original equipment just as your brother’s did, but talent is a dead engine. It runs on every unresolved experience—every unresolved trauma, if you like—in your life. Every conflict. Every mystery. Every deep part of your character you find not just unlikeable but loathsome.” One

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

The sciatica is sleeping. Don’t wake it up.

I spent so much of my early life staring at the hole instead of the donut.

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

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

Holly was about to make herself a Stouffer’s chipped beef on toast for supper—her go-to comfort food

It’s not dark yet, but—as Bob Dylan says—it’s getting there.

She stows her phone in her little shoulder bag and wipes away her latest tears. Why does it hurt so much? Why, when she didn’t even like her mother and she’s so angry about the stupid way her mother died? Was it the J. Geils Band that said love stinks? Since she has time (and five bars), she looks it up on her phone. Then she decides to explore.

There’s the acknowledgement that she has been informed of her mother’s various investment assets, which include a very valuable stock portfolio, Tesla and Apple shares being the pick of the litter.

great unspoken rules of that lady’s life: if you don’t talk about something, if you don’t acknowledge it, it isn’t there. Holly