Scott > Scott's Quotes

“The “Johnson family” became so numerous that a “convention” must be held. In any well-ordered convention all persons of suspicious or doubtful intentions are thrown out at the start. When a bums’ “convention” is to be held, the jungle is first cleared of all outsiders such as “gay cats,” “dingbats,” “whangs,” “bindle stiffs,” “jungle buzzards,” and “scissors bills.” Conventions are not so popular in these droughty days. Formerly kegs of beer were rolled into the jungle and the “punks,” young bums, were sent for “mickies,” bottles of alcohol. “Mulligans” of chicken or beef were put to cooking on big fires. There was a general boiling up of clothes and there was shaving and sometimes haircutting.”
― Jack Black, You Can't Win

“Kid,” said George, when I asked him about the cook. “He’s crazy as a bedbug and the best ‘mulligan’ maker on the road. ‘Montana Blacky’ is welcome at any bum camp anywhere, and he spends his life going from jungle to jungle.”
― Jack Black, You Can't Win

“By January 1967 Motown had built up an unrivalled sales force under the formidable direction of their white Sicilian-American sales boss, Barney Ales, whom Gordy had met when Ales was a rising star at Warner Brothers. Ales was more than a salesman. He had been a strategic lynchpin in Motown’s ability to break through racial barriers and sell its sound to a white teenage audience.”
― Stuart Cosgrove, Detroit 67: The Year That Changed Soul

“ ‘I can tell you, it’s going to end badly; these Asiatics are all like this. After a good pull of young wine, the knife-play begins!’ We mounted our horses and galloped home.”
― Mikhail Lermontov, A Hero of Our Time

“They cooked more than three hundred plates of the food the great Montezuma was going to eat, and more than a thousand more for the guard. I have heard that they used to cook him the flesh of young boys. But as he had such a variety of dishes, made of so many different ingredients, we could not tell whether a dish was of human flesh or anything else, since every day they cooked fowls, turkeys, pheasants, local partridges, quail, tame and wild duck, venison, wild boar, marsh birds, pigeons, hares and rabbits, also many other kinds of birds and beasts native to their country, so numerous that I cannot quickly name them all.”
― Bernal Díaz del Castillo, The Conquest of New Spain

“Then after they had danced the papas laid them down on their backs on some narrow stones of sacrifice and, cutting open their chests, drew out their palpitating hearts which they offered to the idols before them. Then they kicked the bodies down the steps, and the Indian butchers who were waiting below cut off their arms and legs and flayed their faces, which they afterwards prepared like glove leather, with their beards on, and kept for their drunken festivals. Then they ate their flesh with a sauce of peppers and tomatoes. They sacrificed all our men in this way, eating their legs and arms, offering their hearts and blood to their idols as I have said, and throwing their trunks and entrails to the lions and tigers and serpents and snakes that they kept in the wild-beast houses I have described in an earlier chapter.”
― Bernal Díaz del Castillo, The Conquest of New Spain

“went with you or not.” “But what would happen if you quit him and stayed here in Marseille?” “I don’t care.” Aslima began dancing round the room singing a pig-song in her language which is something like this translated: Want to know what’s loving sweet, Want to know what’s loving big? When two naughty lovers meet And unite in loving pigs.”
― Claude McKay, Romance in Marseille

“At thirty-seven, in Key West, Ernest Hemingway badly marked up Wallace Stevens’ face in a never fully explained fistfight. Stevens was fifty-seven when it happened.”
― David Markson, This is Not a Novel and Other Novels

“Nowhere in the world is there music less catchy than the Balinese and Javanese gamelan. The gamelan utilizes only percussion instruments. Gongs, muffled drums (the tredang), metal kettles (trompong), metal disks (the gender). Never do these instruments tell or take hold. But they are not so much percussion instruments as instruments of emerging sound; the sound emerges, a round sound that comes to pay a visit, floats around, then disappears. The resonance is stopped by the fingers, feeling their way, seriously, attentively, in the great carcass of sound.”
― Henri Michaux, A Barbarian in Asia

“Not long after Scott Fitzgerald’s death, Scribner’s let The Great Gatsby go out of print. And then rejected the collection called The Crack-Up.”
― David Markson, This is Not a Novel and Other Novels

“At the age of eight or nine, Richard Brautigan once returned home from school and found that his entire family had moved away without a word.”
― David Markson, This is Not a Novel and Other Novels

“She did not read, she did nothing at all, and hours went by during which even her thoughts came to a standstill. At times she would abruptly throw herself on the floor and lie there pressing her face to the carpet with her eyes tightly closed, until a knock at the door – the maid bringing her lunch tray – made her scramble to her feet in sudden fright.”
― Louis Couperus, Eline Vere

“I had nothing to say, nevertheless I was happy, Bragi handed me a beer, I sat looking at the motley, outré selection of people around me, particularly at Björk of course, it was hard to take your eyes off her. The Sugarcubes were one of the best bands in the world at the moment, right now the room I was in constituted the epicenter of rock music. I was already looking forward to telling Yngve.”
― Karl Ove Knausgård, My Struggle: Book 5

“Bloodshed, rape, robbery, torture, and famine were less revolting to a people whose ordinary life was encompassed by them in milder forms.”
― C.V. Wedgwood, The Thirty Years War

“The reasoning here is typical of Kershaw’s work, which is marred by his describing everything, and I mean everything, about Hitler extremely negatively, even such aspects as relate to his childhood and youth, as if his whole life were tainted by what he would become and do some twenty years later, as if in some way he were evil incarnate, or as if evil were some core inside him, immutable and irremediable, and thereby an explanation of why things turned out the way they did.”
― Karl Ove Knausgård, My Struggle: Book 6

“So-called street canyons in dense cities can create microclimates. Arrayed along rectilinear city grids, sets of skyscrapers can effectively increase wind speeds. Depending on their geometries, clusters can also raise temperatures by capturing solar energy or trapping warm air, thereby exacerbating existing urban heat island effects. In some cases, street canyons channel aerial pollutants up and out of the way—arguably a net benefit to the citizens below—but in other places, tall towers can collectively trap and recirculate smog in undesirable holding patterns.”
― Roman Mars, The 99% Invisible City: A Field Guide to the Hidden World of Everyday Design

“Later in life, he was fond of remarking, rather ruefully, that he always had the last word in all differences of opinion with his wife, and that—two words, actually—was, “Yes, dear.”
― Richard Russo, Empire Falls

“Chad Gadya,” the Passover song he was taught by the rabbis in school, one he would sing to himself in the many nights during which sleep felt like something that only others could enjoy, a nursery rhyme that tells the story of a father who buys a young goat for two farthings, but then the kid—who the wise men said represented Israel in its purest, most innocent state—is killed by a cat, which is bitten by a dog, which is wounded by a stick, which is burned by fire, which is quenched by water, which is drunk by an ox, which is slaughtered by a man, in an unbroken chain of cause and effect, sin and penance, crime and punishment, that reaches all the way to heaven, where the Mighty Lord himself, the Holy One, Blessed be He, smites the angel of death, establishing the Kingdom of God,”
― Benjamín Labatut, The MANIAC

“They had already put together an entire committee to choose the best targets, but it was actually von Neumann who convinced them that they shouldn’t detonate the devices at ground level, but higher up in the atmosphere, since that way the blast wave would cause incomparably larger damage. He even calculated the optimal height himself—six hundred meters, about two thousand feet. And that is exactly how high our bombs were when they exploded above the roofs of those quaint wooden houses in Hiroshima and Nagasaki.”
― Benjamín Labatut, The MANIAC

“When the lambs is lost in the mountain, he said. They is cry. Sometime come the mother. Sometime the wolf.”
― Cormac McCarthy, Blood Meridian, or, the Evening Redness in the West

“He tested the concoction on the schmaltz from last night’s dinner.”
― Jennifer Gilmore, Golden Country

“When I woke up again it was light. I found two of my girlfriend’s old T-shirts in a wardrobe. She must have left them when visiting a long time ago. One was white, and said Russian assets in black across the top of the chest. The other was blue and said brat. It smelled of her, just about. Or I hoped it did.”
― Gabriel Smith, Brat

“When Salman Rushdie became the victim of Ayatollah Khomeini’s fatwa, the writer V. S. Naipaul refused to support him, on the grounds that the fatwa was, after all, only an extreme form of literary criticism.”
― Philippe Lançon, Disturbance