Top 28 John Verdon Quotes
#1. The stories people tell you about themselves seem to retain the possibility of being false. But what you discover about them by yourself seems to be the truth.
John Verdon
#2. The person I think I am is terrified of the person I really am, terrified of what others would think of that person. What would they do to me if they knew the person I really was? Better to be safe! Better to hide the real person, starve the real person, bury the real person!
John Verdon
#3. That boulder is your image of yourself, who you think you are. The person you think you are is keeping the person you really are locked up without light or food or friends. The person you think you are has been trying to murder the person you really are for as long as you both have lived.
John Verdon
#4. Never go down to the darkest room. Stay far away from the rotting coffin. If you want to live through the night, let the devil sleep.
John Verdon
#5. Whatever it was that had drawn him to police work, that had wed him to the job for so many years, it surely wasn't the appeal of a gun or the deceptively simple solution it offers.
John Verdon
#6. He was all too aware of how one's perceptions can start lining up to support a particular conclusion. Once a pattern begins to take shape, however erroneous it might be, the mind unconsciously favors any data points that support it and discounts any that don't.
John Verdon
#7. Who does not feel that Nansen's account of his search for the Pole rather loses than gains in ideal satisfaction by the pretense of a few trifling acquisitions for science?
Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.
#8. The fact that no one was dead persuaded him that he was on the right track
John Verdon
#9. This case is complex. It's got layers to it, Davey. It's a fucking onion ... You're a natural-born onion peeler
the best that ever was.
John Verdon
#10. But grief, he'd discovered, was not an experience you went through once and then 'moved on' (as the idiotic popular phrase would have it). The truth was that it came over you in successive waves - waves separated by periods of numbness, periods of forgetfulness, periods of ordinary living.
John Verdon
#11. The sun sets and we sleep. The sun rises and we wake. We wake and, ever so briefly, ever so blindly, we enjoy the fantasy of beginning anew. Then, without fail, reality reasserts its presence.
John Verdon
#12. Don't worry about whether you can do it, Bailey Bean. Just pretend you can. Pretend enough and it becomes real.
Jill Shalvis
#13. For her, people in general were a plus, a source of positive stimulation (with exceptions such as the predatory Sonya Reynolds). For Gurney, people in general were a minus, a drain on his energy (with exception such as the encouraging Sonya Reynolds).
John Verdon
#14. How many bright angels can dance on a pin? How many hopes drown in a bottle of gin? Did the thought ever come that your glass was a gun and one day you'd wonder, God, what have I done?
John Verdon
#16. Whatever lives is granted breath But by the grace and sufferance of Death.
Countee Cullen
#17. The purpose of life is to get as close as we can to other people.
John Verdon
#18. He knew how isolated he could become and hardly notice it was happening. How relationships could slip away like smoke in the breeze. How easily he could sink into himself. How natural and benign his isolating obsessions could seem.
John Verdon
#19. But how could he stop being what he was? However much he cared for her, however much he wanted to be with her, however much he wanted her to be happy, how could he become someone he wasn't?
John Verdon
#20. Few behaviors of other people are more irritating than those that display our own faults in an unattractive way.
John Verdon
#21. What he took he will give, when he gets what he gave.
John Verdon
#22. We each seem to be wired to believe my situation causes my problems but your personality causes yours. This creates trouble.
John Verdon
#23. What has happened is what has happened. The past is gone. I was not the same person then. I was much weaker. I lived and breathed and hid in fear. That time is gone. I fear nothing. I have faced my fears and learned from them. The gods gave me that.
James A. Moore
#24. The mind is a mass of contradictions and conflicts. We lie to make others trust us. We hide our true selves in the pursuit of intimacy. We chase happiness in ways that drive happiness away. When we're wrong we fight the hardest to prove we're right. Caught
John Verdon
#25. A shrink once told me that an exception is a resentment waiting to be born.
John Verdon
#26. Hardwick was showing the frustration of a man trying to hold his groceries inside a ripped bag.
John Verdon
#27. They looked like linebackers on a prison football team, whose idea of commincation was to smash into something at full speed, preferably another person.
John Verdon
#28. The worst pain in our lives comes from the mistakes we refuse to acknowledge
the things we've done that are so our of harmony with who we are that we can't bear to look at them.
John Verdon
