And he hated himself and hated her,too, for the ruin they'd made of each other.

Maybe there are some things we were put on this earth not to know.

She was afraid of all that and so much more, but what terrified her most was inside of her, an insect of unnatural intelligence who’d been living in her brain her entire life, playing with it, clicking across it, wrenching loose its cables on a whim.

I can't remember coming across a more precise evocation of innocence lost since Golding's The Lord of the Flies. With The Death of Sweet Mister, Daniel Woodrell has written his masterpiece-spare, dark, and incandescently beautiful. It broke my heart.

The ornament of beauty, Shakespeare wrote, is suspect. And he was right. But beauty itself, unadorned and unaffected, is sacred, I think, worthy of our awe and our loyalty.

In Greek tragedy, they fall from great heights. In noir, they fall from the curb.

What's your name?" "Emma Gould," she said. "What's yours?" "Wanted." "By all the girls or just the law?