A Confederacy of Dunces

by John Kennedy Toole

“Mother!” he called. “Not a moment too soon. I’ve been seized.”

“I dust a bit,” Ignatius told the policeman. “In addition, I am at the moment writing a lengthy indictment against our century. When my brain begins to reel from my literary labors, I make an occasional cheese dip.”

When Fortuna spins you downward, go out to a movie and get more out of life.

she walked redly and pinkly along the broken brick sidewalk.

You are aware, of course, that Freud linked paranoia with homosexual tendencies.

discuss her racial problems with her constantly, drawing her out even when she doesn’t feel like discussing them—and I can tell how fervently she appreciates these dialogues with me.

ever since his obese childhood,

for I mingle with my peers or no one, and since I have no peers, I mingle with no one.

Disemboweled, its film entrails spilled onto the floor.

Sandra, personally, is much happier since she was psychoanalyzed. Some doctor at the college helped her out.”

You can always tell employees of the government by the total vacancy which occupies the space where most other people have faces.”

Even my mother, the agent of my destruction, has begun to bite the hand that feeds her.

Personally, I have found that a lack of food and comfort, rather than ennobling the spirit, creates only anxiety within the human psyche and channels all of one’s better impulses only toward the end of procuring something to eat. Even though I do have a Rich Inner Life, I must have some food and comfort also.)

“My sweater cost me forty dollars,” the young man said. He felt the worn portion that had been scraped by the cutlass. “Are you prepared to pay for it?” “Of course not. Never become involved in an altercation with a pauper.”

You could tell by the way that he talked, though, that he had gone to school a long time. That was probably what was wrong with him.

When the suburbanites grow tired of television and Ping-Pong or whatever they do in their little homes, they could chain one another up for a while. Everyone would love it. Wives would say, ‘My husband put me in chains last night. It was wonderful. Has your husband done that to you lately?’