Lucius Shepard Quotes

She’s sad because she’s drinking to be sad because she’s afraid that what she does not feel is actually a feeling. Typical post-modern Manhattan bullshit.

And that in itself was a sufficient reason to hit him, purely for educational purposes: I had, you see, reached the level of drunkenness at which an amoral man such as myself understands his whimsies to be moral imperatives.

The half moon sailed high, sharp-winged shadows skimming across it, and the conical hills and the vine-shrouded trees washed silver-green under the moonlight had the look of a decaying city millennia after a great catastrophe.

She went on to dismiss much of postmodernism as having “an overengineered archness” and, except for a few exemplary authors, being a refuge for those writers whose “disregard for traditional narrative (was) an attempt to disguise either their laziness or their inability to master it.”

And then along came Satan's Eye Itself. Television." He laughed, as at some fatal irony. "Don't you hear the evil hum of the word, the knell of Satan? Television! It's the ruling character of your lives, like the moon must have been for Indians. An oracle, a companion, a signal of the changing seasons. But rather than divine illumination, each night it spews forth Satan's imagery. Murders, car crashes, mad policemen, perverted strangers! And you lie there decomposing in its flickering, blue-gray light, absorbing His horrid fantasies!

Here was a beast for whom there could be no predator. What better definition of God is there than that?

Doesn’t that sound like God to you? This big stupid, invulnerable thing that resembles us and whose creations are more intelligent than it is? The Bible left out that part, but it would explain a great deal.

I glanced at him. He was wearing a pair of mirrored sunglasses, and that consolidated my anger. Why is it, I ask you, that every measly little wimp in the universe thinks he can put on a pair of mirrored sunglasses and instantly acquire magical hipness and cool, rather than—as is the case—looking like an asshole with reflecting eyes?

All journeys end in disappointment if for no other reason than that they end.

You had no right," I said. "You—"
Tuu's face hardened. "We had no right to mislead you? Please, Mr. Puleo. Between our peoples, deception is a tradition.

Every object, the old man had said, is but an interpretation of every other object. There is no sure knowledge, only endless process.

We uncovered new forces, we took a step along what may be an endless path toward divinity, we redirected the entire thrust of psychoanalytic theory, and, as with all knowledge, we found that deeper and more compelling mysteries yet lay beyond those we had reduced to the security of fact.

That the official and the criminal are inextricably aligned should come as no surprise to anyone familiar with the workings of their government, but nowhere is this juxtaposition so literal and apparent as in Mexico City.

It was easy to see how one could think of the family as a single terrible creature stretching back through time, some genetic flaw or chemical magic binding the spirit to the blood.

Overwhelmed with disgust, Donnell said, “I could sell you sorry fuckers anything, couldn’t I?”
They weren’t sure they had heard correctly; they looked at each other, puzzled, asking what had been said.
“I could sell you sorry fuckers anything,” he repeated, “as long as it had a bright package and was wrapped around a chewy nugget of fear. I could be your green-eyed king. But it would bore me to be the salvation of cattle like you. Take my advice, though. Don’t buy the crap that’s slung into your faces by two-bit wart-healers!” He jabbed his cane at Papa Salvatino, who stood open-mouthed in the aisle, a litter of paper cups and fans and Bibles spreading out from his feet. “Find your own answers, your own salvation. If you can’t do that,” said Donnell, “then to Hell with you.”