Our culture is rife with parenthood porn, the idea that children are bundles of innocent joy and our love for them should be unconfined—keeping silent about the fact you may occasionally wish to bang their head, or your own, against a wall. Resisting this urge is precisely what makes the bond between the generations so strong, but sometimes you want to do the banging nonetheless.

- Michael Marshall Smith

Chaos stalks us all, gaining entrance through cracks in trivial maintenance, the thing left undone. As soon as you realize how much there is to do to keep presenting a front, it becomes horribly easy to stop believing, and start counting again instead.

- Michael Marshall Smith

Sometimes, she even just . . . forgot. That had been best of all, the times when she suddenly remembered—because it proved there had been a period, however short, when she had not.

- Michael Marshall Smith

After years in which your life has melded with that of your partner, suddenly you've spent a period as an individual again.

- Michael Marshall Smith

It is impossible to stop yourself feeling things. Feelings are like cats (as he also used to say). You can enjoy them, appreciate them, be annoyed to hell by them—but there ain’t nothing you can actually do about them. Cats and feelings act outside the realm of human control.

- Michael Marshall Smith

There’s a lot of sleight of hand in relationships, too, and talking excavates all the tricks. It’s a hell of a risk, assuming you’ll still want to watch the magician, and live that life, once you know how all the gags are done.

- Michael Marshall Smith

Americans are like the children of a mafia leader.

They don't know what their father does for a living, and they always wonder why from time to time someone throws a fire bomb through their window.

- /u/BattlerBaster

Is killing always the worst thing you can do? Regardless of what's come before?

- Michael Marshall Smith

US intelligence didn't fail to prevent 9/11 purely because of incompetence. The assumption is always that we're so much more capable than the rest of the world. They don't win matches, we sometimes drop the ball. Wrong. Sometimes the bad guys win because they're as good as we are. Strength of will and purity of hate will make up a huge technology gap. To believe otherwise is to be a country still stuck on Spring Break, goggle-eyed with the contents of our culture's wet T-shirts, the first heart-stopping whupping of our life just visible on the horizon.

- Michael Marshall Smith

War is atrocity, pure and simple: only greed, nationalism and faith help us pretend otherwise.

- Michael Marshall Smith

News editors and couch potatoes are our keenest legal minds these days, it appears.

- Michael Marshall Smith

Law & Order "Virtue"

Defense Attorney, Deirdre Powell: That's a shame, counselor because as it turns out for my client if was the most expensive roll in the hay in history.

Sarah Maslin: I bring in more business than any other lawyer in the firm. I teach securities at Columbia law school. I chair several committees at the bar association. I've drafted legislation passed by congress.

- Law & Order "Virtue" 

Hell is being alive, and being alive is all there is.

- Michael Marshall Smith

Everyone thinks they’re the star, but instead is merely cannon fodder waiting in line to have promises broken by friends, lovers, and fate.

- Michael Marshall Smith

There are times when reasonableness is the worst cut of all, because if everyone’s being adult and yet the world is still broken, where do you go from there?

- Michael Marshall Smith

@NatBaimel

It showed you could live in a city, be one of its inhabitants, without comprehending or being part of its wider picture. Like mice living in a human house—it was their address, but that didn’t mean they had rights, that they had to be viewed with anything more than benign amusement, that they weren’t fair game for cats or traps. Similarly, you could sit in a restaurant all day without ever becoming more than just some guy temporarily taking up space that belonged to someone else, space you hired by handing over money for coffee and burgers. Even if you had your nice house in the suburbs you paid tithes in every direction: you chipped away at the loan you took to buy the property, you hacked at the vig for your son’s dentistry and the money pit of your daughter’s some-day wedding, you paid the insurance that might cover your parents’ tumor care but wouldn’t save their lives. You took your days and handed them over to other people, who did things with them, who made stuff with your days, who sold their products with your life. Your days, your time, were their secret ingredient, their twelfth herb or spice; your life was given away free in the bottom of their packets like invisible Cracker Jack treats. In return they helped you pay off some of your debts to the banks and the hospitals and fate—and so you went back and forth, every day, riding the rail between your house and your place of work, driving in a machine you were paying off in installments and which someone would tow off your driveway, no matter how manicured, within days of a payment not being made. 

You kept doing this until you got old and your life started running in reverse, and you went from having a whole house to just a room in one of your children’s houses, assuming they’d take you, and finally to a room in a stranger’s building, some rest home, surrounded by old geezers you’d never met before and might not have liked even if you had: the young don’t understand that the physical similarities of old people do not mean they’re the same inside. They don’t all got rhythm either. Even more acutely than failing health, this progression makes it bluntly clear that life is going in very much the wrong direction. All that time spent owning a house, all those loans and aspirations, are erased, wiped off the disk of your life. It is lifted gently out of your hands like a kitchen knife taken from someone too young. The things you acquired and which have helped define you are given or sold or thrown away, and you are squeezed again into a little room, as if you were twelve once more—but this time, instead of feeling at one with the outside world, by now the whole thing has long ago stopped making sense. You sit in quiet places and look out of windows and try not to panic as you notice both how much you are forgetting these days, and how little of value there is to forget. The layers of self you spent decades accreting are dissolved, reducing you once again to dependence; and there’s no kidding yourself that this is a mere stage to be got through, that your time lies ahead. It doesn’t. You’ve had your time. Your time has been and gone. Now you are merely color in the background of someone else’s time, and even that probably won’t be for long. 

Meanwhile other people now drive your freeway to and from work, and live in your old house, and repaint the walls and tear down your shelves, and the planet spins.

- Michael Marshall Smith

The huddled forms on every street corner and in each piss-reeking doorway show that the music of civilization stops often, and there are never quite enough chairs.

- Michael Marshall Smith