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