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It was all a matter of hard work and luck, and Ryan didn't mind either of those. No, the stuff that wore you down was the parts where no amount or work seemed to make the difference, where luck simply wasn't there and wasn't coming and you couldn't seem to explain that to someone who had their heart set on the world being the way it was supposed to be, instead of the way it was.

— Michael Marshall Smith The Lonely Dead (2004)

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More quotes by Michael Marshall Smith

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

The Lonely Dead (2004)

One of the big things about being a man, she'd noted, was that being good, doing the work, wasn't enough. It had to be generally acknowledged that here you were, damn well seeing to business.

The Lonely Dead (2004)

Death is real. Death changes things. Everything else is filler, merely a message from our sponsor.

The Lonely Dead (2004)

My limited experience of such things told me that you get closest to the truth by not giving it advance warning that you're coming after it.

The Lonely Dead (2004)

First time you hear something, it sounds outlandish and broken and like it doesn't make sense. But once it's been in your head awhile it's as if the other thoughts in there wriggle out of the way to give it some room.

The Lonely Dead (2004)

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Attribution

Quote text and notes from Wikiquote: Michael Marshall Smith (page history), available under CC BY-SA 4.0. Source quality and labels are our own summary of what Wikiquote records.