Things I dog-eared in Shaft by Ernest Tidyman

[dodont]

p48: "Survival was a dark place, a black place."

p63-64: "Time lost its continuum for him now and then. He was getting old or getting bored ... Years ago he had wondered about his wife and children in those broken hours of darkness. Now he assumed that they were all right or that somebody would tell him if they were not. He felt now as if that part of his life did not exist, as though it had vanished along with the sequence of time."

p72: "Somewhere above him there was a light, a single bulb glimmering into all this treachery of decay. Only the barest flicker of it reached him. He could not even see his own feet in the murk. They found their way up the stairs."

p76: "It wouldn't change if he were buying a pack of cigarettes or if, as now, he were buying a piece of death."

p81: "He landed and was away with a blur of motion. Now nobody could catch him. Nobody could hurt him. This was his way in the world. These dark streets were his place. An exultation of power fed his body from the pit of his stomach. He missed that. He ran, flew. They would find the alley, the doorway, the hidden place in the moment that they needed it."

p83: "A mask, but not a mask. Even in sleep, there was life in it. Life and strength."

p87: "It was the underside of the world, the antithesis and the opposite."

p98: "They were so goddamn cool but their minds were tearing at each other, ripping and smashing at each other like a pair of studs hungry for the same woman. Power was the woman and they were both after her."

p120: "'No name,' he said."

p150: "The small collections of jumble and dust glowed at him under the fragile cowardice of night lights. The doorways were dark and silent, emptier than the hopes that lived behind them ... It just came, that's all. Its mother was desperation and its father was anger. The seed of it was planted back in the No Name when he realized what was happening and that he had somehow to change the pattern of it, take a positive role in it."

p151: "There were still some people around. Standing, walking, talking. Just staring into the night. The spooked, the stoned and the sleepless.

p204: "He started for the dark stairs, listening to the churning mass of confusion he had caused, listening for the voices of the ones he wanted."

p213: "He played with names and continents. Nobody would know him, nobody would want him. He would lose himself. He would let the smell of death wash away with each mile, each strange place, each new person he encountered. He wouldn't even given them his right name. They wouldn't know who he was or what he was. And that would make them even."