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‘Shit don’t mean shit.’ Jimmy Gold
She believed in the dreams even more than he did, and she was right to believe.
anger had been his lifelong default position
What do you know about life, let alone literature?’
even the greatest storms begin as gentle breezes.
‘Jails’re full of guys who were relaxed.
Birds chirruped in the trees, discussing the night just past and plans for the day.
Also, home was the place where, when you go there, they have to take you in – the gospel according to Robert Frost –
Mr Jacoby liked to say in history class that knowledge was power, and Pete supposed that was why he felt compelled to monitor his parents’ escalating war of words.
For that matter, how could either of them afford to go? They were broke already.
my guest, but—’ TOM (roaring): ‘Is whining what you call it? I call it reality.
‘Are they gonna get divorced, do you think?’ Pete was doubly shocked: first by the question, then by the adult matter-of-factness of it. He started to say No, course not, then thought how much he disliked movies where adults lied to children, which was like all movies. ‘I don’t know. Not tonight, anyway. The courts are closed.’
Most of the people on Sycamore Street were so wedded to their televisions once prime time started that they wouldn’t have noticed a UFO if one landed on their lawn,
It wasn’t likely Mrs Muller would die of a heart attack before tomorrow, but it was possible; as another great poet said, hope springs eternal in the human breast.
Denver or hell, it made no difference to Morris.
His mother and father told him not to get his hopes up, but Pete didn’t buy that. He felt that if you didn’t have hopes and ambitions when you were a teenager, you’d be pretty much fucked later on.
No! It’s just my opinion, you see, and opinions are like assholes: everybody has one.’
Occam’s razor principle.’ According to that, the simplest and most obvious answer was usually the right one.
‘Lots of compliments, because those are free.
headed for dead-end marriages and dead-end jobs. They would raise dead-end kids and dandle dead-end grandkids before coming to their own dead ends in dead-end hospitals and nursing homes, rocketing off into darkness believing they had lived the American Dream and Jesus would meet them at the gates of heaven with the Welcome Wagon.
Morris was meant for better things. He just didn’t know what they were.
And the next time you peek up a woman’s skirt, you might remember something Mark Twain said: “Any idler in need of a haircut can look.”’
For readers, one of life’s most electrifying discoveries is that they are readers – not just capable of doing it (which Morris already knew), but in love with it. Hopelessly. Head over heels. The first book that does that is never forgotten, and each page seems to bring a fresh revelation, one that burns and exalts: Yes! That’s how it is! Yes! I saw that, too! And, of course, That’s what I think! That’s what I FEEL!
good novelist does not lead his characters, he follows them. A good novelist does not create events, he watches them happen and then writes down what he sees. A good novelist realizes he is a secretary, not God.’
What you need to see – what Rothstein finally saw, although it took him three books to do it – is that most of us become everyone.
As the twig is bent the bough is shaped, that was another old saying, and once a pretentious asshole, always a pretentious asshole.
Drew thinks there’s nothing more terrifying than boys of seventeen. You have absolutely no idea what they’ll do.
While I, on the other hand, only care about money, and money simplifies everything.
Alea iacta est. The die is cast.
‘Parents can be very stupid,’
Well, you know what they say – in the midst of fuckin life we’re in fuckin death.’
What are you, twenty-two? Rothstein had asked him. Twenty-three? That was a good guess by an observant man. Morris had been twenty-three. Now he’s on the cusp of sixty, and the years between have disappeared like smoke in a breeze.
He has heard people say sixty is the new forty, but that’s bullshit. When you’ve spent most of your life in prison, sixty is the new seventy-five.
No one rides for free, and in the end, even the most seaworthy ship goes down, blub-blub-blub. The only way to balance that off, in Hodges’s opinion, is to make the most of every day afloat.
The Bald Beater is James Belson, whose picture should probably be next to white trash in the dictionary.
But of course, sometimes life does imitate art.’
It’s true what they say – sometimes the neuros are crazier than the patients.’
