Anthony Policastro > Anthony's Quotes

“Chandler wrote like a slumming angel and invested the sun-blinded streets of Los Angeles with a romantic presence.”
― Ross MacDonald

“It was some time since I had gone to sleep in the same room with a girl. Of course, the room was large and reasonably well-lighted, and the girl had other things than me on her mind.”
― Ross MacDonald, The Blue Hammer

“To say goodbye is to die a little.”
― Raymond Chandler, The Long Goodbye

“Ability is what you're capable of doing. Motivation determines what you do. Attitude determines how well you do it. ”
― Raymond Chandler

“From 30 feet away she looked like a lot of class. From 10 feet away she looked like something made up to be seen from 30 feet away.”
― Raymond Chandler, The High Window

“If you can keep your head when all about you
Are losing theirs and blaming it on you,
If you can trust yourself when all men doubt you,
But make allowance for their doubting too;!”
― Rudyard Kipling, If: A Father's Advice to His Son

“Don't judge each day by the harvest you reap but by the seeds that you plant.”
― Robert Louis Stevenson

“We are all travelers in the wilderness of this world, and the best we can find in our travels is an honest friend.”
― Robert Louis Stevenson

“The mind is its own place, and in itself can make a heaven of hell, a hell of heaven..”
― John Milton, Paradise Lost

“You fight your superficiality, your shallowness, so as to try to come at people without unreal expectations, without an overload of bias or hope or arrogance, as untanklike as you can be, sans cannon and machine guns and steel plating half a foot thick; you come at them unmenacingly on your own ten toes instead of tearing up the turf with your caterpillar treads, take them on with an open mind, as equals, man to man, as we used to say, and yet you never fail to get them wrong. You might as well have the brain of a tank. You get them wrong before you meet them, while you're anticipating meeting them; you get them wrong while you're with them; and then you go home to tell somebody else about the meeting and you get them all wrong again. Since the same generally goes for them with you, the whole thing is really a dazzling illusion. ... The fact remains that getting people right is not what living is all about anyway. It's getting them wrong that is living, getting them wrong and wrong and wrong and then, on careful reconsideration, getting them wrong again. That's how we know we're alive: we're wrong. Maybe the best thing would be to forget being right or wrong about people and just go along for the ride. But if you can do that -- well, lucky you.”
― Philip Roth, American Pastoral

“He had learned the worst lesson that life can teach - that it makes no sense.”
― Philip Roth, American Pastoral

“The only obsession everyone wants: 'love.' People think that in falling in love they make themselves whole? The Platonic union of souls? I think otherwise. I think you're whole before you begin. And the love fractures you. You're whole, and then you're cracked open. ”
― Philip Roth, The Dying Animal

“Sir... I... don't want... to... be... here," I said between sobs. There, I'd said it. Now everyone would be happy- Cadet Daily, my mother...

Yes, you do, Davis."

No, sir... I don't," I gasped.

Homesick?"

I shook my head from side to side. "No... sir... it's too much... like home.”
― Amy Efaw

“Personally, I don’t think there's intelligent life on other planets. Why should other planets be any different from this one?”
― Bob Monkhouse

“People used to laugh at me when I said I wanted to be a comedian. Well they're not laughing now.”
― Bob Monkhouse, Crying With Laughter: My Life Story

“There is nothing to writing. All you do is sit down at a typewriter and bleed.”
― Ernest Hemingway

“Man reading should be man intensely alive. The book should be a ball of light in one's hand.”
― Ezra Pound

“I think it is all a matter of love; the more you love a memory the stronger and stranger it becomes”
― Vladimir Nabokov

“An eerie feeling of being watched took hold as an ill-tempered wind tore across the prairie, stirring up a dust devil.”
― Kimber Silver, Bullets in the Briar