Tom Kelly > Quotes

“He also knows that when he comes back home empty-handed, as he will do regularly, he will have no satisfactory explanation. He is well aware, for he has met dozens of them, of the numbers of people that will approach him on street corners and in bars and at parties, who will open each conversation with, “Well, did you get him yet?” When he answers no, they will be off and running. They will tell him in delighted tones and in the clearest detail the story of a friend of theirs who has a feeble-minded nephew. Of how this nephew is occasionally allowed home on leave from the state funny farm. How that the last time this poor defective creature was home, week before last, he went out in the woods just behind the house, sat on a log, and with a turkey yelper that was given away as a souvenir by a typewriter company in 1937, yelped twice, and killed a turkey that weighed twenty-three pounds—picked.”
― Tom Kelly, Tenth Legion: Bible of Wild Turkey Hunting

“The first turkey that ever came to me on the ground did it a long time ago. I sat there with my hands shaking and my breath short and my heart hammering so hard I could not understand why he could not hear it. The last turkey that came to me last spring had exactly the same effect, and the day that this does not happen to me is the day that I quit.”
― Tom Kelly

“In learning to Juggle, the angst comes from failure - from having the ball fall to the floor. So with step one, numb aspiring jugglers to that. Having the ball fall to the floor becomes more normal than the ball not falling to the floor.”
― Tom Kelly and David Kelly