Top 70 Ben H. Winters Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “I will never fall in love again. This will be the last time.”

— Ben H. Winters

2. “An invisible man is an expendable man.”

— Ben H. Winters

3. “Freedom is a matter of logistics.”

— Ben H. Winters

4. “This is how it ends: you just stop.”

— Ben H. Winters

5. “What is about to happen is not the reclaiming of Earth by a triumphant Mother Nature, a karmic repudiation of humanity’s arrogant ill stewardship. Nothing we ever did mattered one way or another. This event has always been in the cards for man’s planet, for the whole scope of our history, coming regardless of what we did or didn’t do.”

— Ben H. Winters

6. “Time makes things worse. Bad is faster than good. Wickedness is a weed and does not wither on its own. It grows and spreads.”

— Ben H. Winters

7. “A pool of melancholy blooms in my chest and rushes into my body like deep-blue blood.”

— Ben H. Winters

8. “What the slave wants but can never have is not only freedom from the chains but also from their memory.”

— Ben H. Winters

9. “There is little novelty in the detective who cannot solve himself.”

— Ben H. Winters

10. “It is a strange kind of fire, the fire of self-righteousness, which gives us such pleasure by its warmth but does so little to banish the darkness.”

— Ben H. Winters

11. “I didn’t feel it anymore. I had long since stopped feeling it, that feeling you get coming into Freedman Town the first time, the surreal astonishment that such a place can exist. A not inconsiderable swath of a major city, in a wealthy industrialized country, in the twenty-first century, in such a grievous state of disrepair. An indivisible city, floating like a dead island, in the wide water of civilization.”

— Ben H. Winters

12. “4. People talk about the asteroid that killed the dinosaurs, like it just happened one day. All the dinosaurs were hanging out, all together in an open field, and the asteroid slammed down and destroyed them, killed them all and all at once. Not so, of course. Some died on the day, no doubt about it, and probably a lot – but the whole business took years. Generations, maybe. They can’t say for sure. They know that a ten-kilometer.”

— Ben H. Winters

13. “No. Skeve is not any kind of terrorist. He’s an idiot.” “The overlapping Venn-diagram section of those two categories, you will find, can be quite large.”

— Ben H. Winters

14. “Solving a murder is not about serving the victim, because the victim is, after all, dead. Solving a murder serves society by restoring the moral order that has been upset by the gunshot or knife strike or poisoning, and it serves to preserve that moral order by warning others that certain acts cannot be committed with impunity.”

— Ben H. Winters

15. “I hold Ruthie’s hand and she holds my hand, we sit like that, giving each other strength, like strangers on a crashing plane.”

— Ben H. Winters

16. “Sandy leans forward and kisses me, and I kiss her back, pressing myself against her, my excitement about the investigation rolling over, accelerating, transforming into that other big feeling, that exhilarating and terrifying feeling – not love, but the thing that feels like love – bodies rising to each other, nerve endings opening up and seeking each other – a feeling I know, even as it floods into my veins and my joints, that I will probably never feel again. Last time, for this.”

— Ben H. Winters

17. “The end of the world changes everything, from a law-enforcement perspective.”

— Ben H. Winters

18. “I can’t solve the crime unless I know everything and the world can’t end with the crime unsolved, that’s all there is to it, so I tighten my grip on her shoulders and demand that she remember.”

— Ben H. Winters

19. “A question is a cup you hold out to be filled, and there are those who will always fill it to the brim, pour in all the truth they can think of, until it overflows and spills out and spreads across the table. That’s not me. Me, I’ll give you what’s precisely true and no more; I’ll answer your question and shut up.”

— Ben H. Winters

20. “It’s such a fine line with people, whether they’re playing dumb or being dumb.”

— Ben H. Winters

21. “Almost always, things are exactly as they appear. People are continually looking at the painful or boring parts of life with the half-hidden expectation that there is more going on beneath the surface, some deeper meaning that will eventually be unveiled; we’re waiting for the saving grace, the shocking reveal. But almost always things just are what they are, almost always there’s no glittering one hidden under the dirt.”

— Ben H. Winters

22. “When you have been in love with someone in the past, there are a million small trapdoors you can fall through that would take you right back.”

— Ben H. Winters

23. “This then will be the shape and the feel of the world: an abandoned shell, signs of old life, curious animals wandering in and out of ruins, the wilderness crowding in, overtaking all human structures and human things.”

— Ben H. Winters

24. “I have to wonder if it isn’t more accurate to say that life is a series of trap doors, and you fall through them, one by one, tumbling down and down and down, one hole to the next.”

— Ben H. Winters

25. “I had spent so much of my life costumed and posing, turning and changing myself, like changing the channels on a television set, that sometimes when I was caught as I was now, in a silent moment, just waiting, nothing to do but sit and wait and think in a white and airless room, I felt like a blank screen. I felt like a dead teleision. I was myself. I was nothing.”

— Ben H. Winters

26. “Pure uncomplicated summertime.”

— Ben H. Winters

27. “What she was doing was, she was letting it be his idea. She was walking him along, holding his hand tightly enough to lead him, loosely enough for him to be unaware of it. She was an absolute natural. Or maybe all women could do that to all men, if they wanted to.”

— Ben H. Winters

28. “I am a question mark aimed at an answer.”

— Ben H. Winters

29. “I bore silent witness, thinking, There is no army of abolition. This is what the world has for heroes. Ordinary men, squabbling and prideful. Hassling each other, doing their best, busting the world free. And men like me, behind fake papers and clear-glass spectacles, keeping it chained.”

— Ben H. Winters

30. “An investigation’s proper course cannot be mapped in advance. It follows each piece of information forward to the next one.”

— Ben H. Winters

31. “It must be that there is something in the hearts of human beings, some natural fluid perhaps, that insists on happiness, even confronted with the most powerful arguments against it.”

— Ben H. Winters

32. “She keeps talking, and I keep listening, writing down every word she says, even as some hungry part of my mind flies off into a corner, huddles with this new information – a morphine addict, some kind of opiate, for a period – and begins to chew on it, taste its marrow, decide how it might be digested. Decide if it’s true.”

— Ben H. Winters

33. “One does not contemplate failure, or even death, when one believes oneself to be on a crusade.”

— Ben H. Winters

34. “I do it even now, you see? I play false, I dance and dance. I murmur the stories in shadow or half shadow; I pretend to myself that I don’t remember the names, the details, when in fact I do. I did and I do – I remember all their names.”

— Ben H. Winters

35. “It’s an attempted murder. It’s a suicide, but you’re attempting to make it seem like a murder.”

— Ben H. Winters

36. “He looks up at the sound of the gravel crunch on the driveway, and I catch a flash of impression, a reclusive animal surprised in his lair by the arrival of the hunters.”

— Ben H. Winters

37. “Something was piercing through me, some kind of heat burning the raw layer under the skin. Something I couldn’t then explain and that even now I have trouble transforming from thought into words. But something was happening. A dial was turning. You can imagine a compass needle twitching to life – the smallest pulse – the barest movement – struggling for north.”

— Ben H. Winters

38. “It’s like a concert with no stage, no bands, no electricity; a concert that’s all audience.”

— Ben H. Winters

39. “When I’m dreaming of Alison Koechner, what I’m dreaming of is not dying. Okay? See? I get it.”

— Ben H. Winters

40. “I did not see the white people, only the black: and as I watched I swore I could see fumes rising from their mouths – fumes rolling out of their mouths like exhaust, and I could see that every black person had the same small cloud of angry smoke coming out of his or her mouth and nose, a haze rolling up off the street like exhaust, filling the air, the white people breathing all that and not knowing it. Someone.”

— Ben H. Winters

41. “It’s not just a person’s present that dies when they die, when they are murdered or drowned or a giant rock falls on their head. It’s the past, too, all the memories that belonged only to them, the things they thought and never said. And all those possible futures, all the ways that life might have turned out. Past and future and present all burn up together like a bundle of sticks. Most.”

— Ben H. Winters

42. “They’d been improving the machinery of slavery for two centuries, inventing new tortures to make people work harder and longer. Stripping slaves of their names, their families, their spirits. This is where it went next: people with no bloodline, people with no past and no future, people with no claim to freedom.”

— Ben H. Winters

43. “Madness creeps in very quickly at the edges of such speculation. Not just madness, but a kind of horror, a flickering red field closing in. Just the thought of it.”

— Ben H. Winters

44. “It is remarkable, when you consider it, all the complicated worlds we construct to avoid anything that might disturb us or cause us pain. The bulwarks and baffles we build up, the moats and the mazes.”

— Ben H. Winters

45. “Vengeance is the cheapest of motivations, it’s a tin star on a shabby coat. I want answers is all that I want.”

— Ben H. Winters

46. “But that’s how it works: no matter what the odds of a given event, that one-in-whatever-it-is has to come in at some point, or it wouldn’t be a one-in-whatever chance. It would be zero.”

— Ben H. Winters

47. “Alison sends a long look out across the river, at the rowers, the ducks, the clouds easing along in parallel with the water line. She is not the first girl I ever kissed, but she remains the one I’ve kissed the most, in all my life thus far.”

— Ben H. Winters

48. “She’s like a picture of our mother that someone crumpled up and tried to smooth out again.”

— Ben H. Winters

49. “Sometimes it’s possible, just barely possible, to imagine a version of this world different from the existing one, a world in which there is true justice, heroic honesty, a clear perception possessed by each individual about how to treat all the others. Sometimes I swear I could see it, glittering in the pavement, glowing between the words in a stranger’s sentence, a green, impossible vision – the world as it was meant to be, like a mist around the world as it is.”

— Ben H. Winters

50. “The perseverance in this world, despite it all, of things done right.”

— Ben H. Winters