More on this book
Community
Kindle Notes & Highlights
That was life, he finally concluded. People shouldn’t just go launching into it if they can’t take a joke.
Each day and every deed’s eternal, little boy. Live them in such a way that you can bear to live with them eternally.
This had become a major point of trade that had supplied the customers who drew the girls, who brought the pimps, who dealt the drugs, which bred the guns that shot the kids who lived in the house that crack built.
Her personality is a long-running radio drama that is broadcast chiefly for her own amusement, much as she suspects is true of many people. Obviously some prefer personas that are tuned into light comedy, while judged by their expressions the few individuals waiting at the lights with her have modelled their essential natures on the weather forecast. Or perhaps Religious Affairs, Alma reasons after a consideration of the Deco edifice that looms behind her while she stands there by the crossing. Opened in the 1930s as the Savoy Cinema and operating as the ABC throughout her back-row dating
...more
she’s looking nervously at Burt and Roman, who give the impression that there’s something going badly wrong simply by turning up, like uniformed Gestapo officers at a pet funeral.
Across the street, incontinent lamps stand apologetically in puddles of their own piss-coloured light.
His life picks up pace until he’s skimming through the years as though he’s on a Raleigh bicycle, with his exhilaration only slightly curtailed by the stark fact that, in life, there don’t seem to be any brakes. You can’t stop and you can’t even slow down.
Women. Can’t live with ’em, can’t remember where you put your socks.
He’s a wild card, a maverick who won’t play by the rules. He’s in a big town where the streets aren’t always mean but can be pretty fucking ignorant.
To Studs it’s much like quantum theory, women, or contemporary jazz in that it don’t make any sense.
Her expression had been like a knife fight between pity and contempt while incredulity looked on and didn’t do a damned thing.
Sooner or later all the people and the places that we loved are finished, and the only way to keep them safe is art. That’s what art’s for. It rescues everything from time.”
