Цитаты из книги Американські боги

There was a smell like burning plastic. It was the cigarette, Shadow realized: it had burned down to the filter. Laura did not seem to have noticed.

"We got maudlin. It was sweet. We got stupid.

It doesn't matter as much.""It matters to me."

we didn't call it that, we did not call it anything-for most of the last two years."

The tip of the cigarette glowed orange. "I'm still grateful.

"Puppy," she said. "Could you-do you think you could possibly get me a cigarette?”
<…>
There's a machine in the lobby."Shadow pulled on his jeans and a T-shirt and went, barefoot, into the lobby. The night clerk was a middle-aged man, reading a book by John Grisham. Shadow bought a pack of Virginia Slims from the machine. He asked the night clerk for a book of matches.

He would have known her in a crowd of a thousand, or of a hundred thousand.

"These are gods who have been forgotten, and now might as well be dead. They can be found only in dry histories. They are gone, all gone, but their names and their images remain with us."

Shadow knew that he did not have the personality to be a magician: he could not weave the stories that were so necessary for belief,

He ordered a cheese and meatball pizza, then he ran a bath, pouring all the motel's little plastic bottles of shampoo into the water, making it foam.He was too big to lie down in the bathtub, but he sat in it and luxuriated as best he could. Shadow had promised himself a bath when he got out of prison, and Shadow kept his promises.

"I got hijacked by a fat kid," said Shadow. "He says to tell you that you have been consigned to the dungheap of history while people like him ride in their limos down the superhighways of life. Something like that."


"Little snot," said Wednesday.

He was beginning to feel lightheaded. He hoped that he was not going to be sick.

The glinting fiber-optic lights inside the limo continued to change, cycling through their set of dim colors. It seemed to Shadow that the boy's eyes were glinting too, the green of an antique computer monitor.

The boy inhaled deeply, then held his breath. He let the smoke trickle out from his mouth, pulled it back into his nostrils. Shadow suspected that he had practiced that in front of a mirror for a while before doing it in public. "If you've lied to me," said the boy, as if from a long way away, "I'll fucking kill you. You know that."

The cigarette appeared to have been hand-rolled, and when the boy lit it, with a matte black Zippo lighter, it smelled a little like burning electrical parts.

"You're working for Wednesday," said the young man.
"Yes," said Shadow.
"What the fuck is he after? I mean, what's he doing here? He must have a plan. What's the game plan?"
"I started working for Mister Wednesday this morning," said Shadow. "I'm an errand boy."
"You're saying you don't know?"
"I'm saying I don't know,"

Keep your answers short and to the point or I'll fucking kill you.

Shadow's temples felt as if they had been reattached to the rest of his skull with roofing nails.

Back in prison, Low Key Lyesmith had once referred to the little prison cemetery out behind the infirmary as the Bone Orchard, and the image had taken root in Shadow's mind. That

Snowflakes danced in the beams of her headlights.
<…>
With the headlights gone, the world was dark. Twilight faded into night. Shadow kept expecting the act of walking to warm him, to spread warmth through his icy hands and feet. It didn't happen.