Andy Weston > Andy's Quotes

“And the time came for him to start on his travels, the carpenter gave him a little table. It was made of ordinary wood and there was nothing special about its appearance, but it had one excellent quality. If you put it down and said: ‘Table, set yourself,’ instantly a tablecloth would appear on the good little table, and on the tablecloth there would be a plate with a knife and fork beside it, and as many platters of roast meat and stewed meat as there was room for, and a big glass of the kind of red wine that rejoices the heart.”
― Grimm Brothers, Fairy Tales of the Brothers Grimm

“Every morning, after prayers, the pirate leader removed his black loincloth which was his only garb and bent over the poop in front of the altar while each of his men filed past him in devout silence, kissed his exposed arse and emitted a sharp bark of adulation while slapping his buttocks briefly with the flat of their blades.”
― Angela Carter, The Infernal Desire Machines of Doctor Hoffman

“I am practising to be like the earth. If I am cold, I light a fire. If I am hurt, I breathe and allow tears to flow. If I am fearful, I step closer to the source of fear. If I am alone, I go outside into the wilds for their solace and company.”
― Tamsin Calidas, I Am an Island

“Climb if you will, but remember that courage and strength are nought without prudence, and that a momentary negligence may destroy the happiness of a lifetime. Do nothing in haste; look well to each step; and from the beginning think what may be the end.”
― Edward Whymper, Scrambles Amongst the Alps

“The roads that lead to truth and honesty are cut by flooding, filth, dog turds, lies, and blackouts, but why did he obstinately maintain his belief that a better world was possible? Why did he strive to reduce humanity to the dreams and quotations he gleaned on the pages of his texts? It’s called cowardice, perhaps even amnesia, or indeed a combination of the two. The world is beyond redemption, as Requiem put it. But supposing”
― Fiston Mwanza Mujila, Tram 83

“Eyes shrivelled by cigarettes and alcohol. Potbellies full to bursting with roundworms, amoebas, earthworms, and assorted mollusks. Heads shaved with knives. Arms and legs stiff with digging graves from morning till morning. They were close to ten, maybe twelve years old. They toted the same justifications: “We’re doing this to pay for our studies. Dad’s already gone with the locomotives. He doesn’t write no more. Mom’s sick. The uncles and aunts and grandmothers say we’re sorcerers and it’s because of that dad got married a third time and that our sorcery comes from our mom and that we should go to see the preachers who will cut the ,inks by getting us to swallow palm oil to make us vomit up our sorcery and prevent us flying round at night.” They lived off a multitude of rackets, like all the kids in town.
They worked as porters at the Northern Station, and on the Congo River and at the Central Market, as slim-jims in the mines, errand boys at Tram 83, undertakers, and gravediggers. The more sensitive ones stood guard at the greasy spoons abutting the station, whose metal structure recalled the 1885s, in exchange for a bowl of badly boiled beans.”
― Fiston Mwanza Mujila , Tram 83

“Miss Steele was a thin, quiet woman of about sixty, who used rouge and powder somewhat heavily, whose white, frizzy, well-kept hair had the appearance of being, without being, a wig, and whose whole manner gave the impression of her having, without her having had, a past. She was careful to avow at all times her predilection for ‘fun’, for ‘cocktails’, for ‘broadmindedness’, for those who in common with her were ‘cursed’ with a sense of humour, and for the company of young people as opposed to ‘old fogies’ like herself. But she had, in fact, little fun, no cocktails, and no company younger than that furnished by the Rosamund Tea Rooms. She was also advanced in the matter of culture, for she had no time for ‘modern novels’. Instead she read endless Boots’ biographies of historical characters, and was, in fact, a historian.”
― Patrick Hamilton, The Slaves of Solitude

“Biff..
What he had said to Alice was true - he did like freaks. He had a special friendly feeling for sick people and cripples.
Whenever somebody with a harelip or TB came into the place he would set him up to beer. Or if the customer were a hunchback or a bad cripple, then it would be whisky in the house. There was one fellow who had had his peter and his left leg blown off in a boiler explosion, and whenever he came to town there was a free pint waiting for him.”
― Carson McCullers, Heart Is a Lonely Hunter

“Mick..drew the big black letters very slowly. At the top she wrote EDISON, and under that she drew the names of DICK TRACY and MUSSOLINI. Then in each corner with the largest letters of all and outlined in red, she wrote her initials - M.K. When that was done she crossed over to the opposite wall and wrote a very bad word - PUSSY, and beneath that she put her initials too.”
― Carson McCullers, The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter

“Portia.. (to Mick) ‘But you haven’t never loved God nor even nair person. You hard and tough as cowhide. But just the same I knows you.
This afternoon you going to roam all over the place without never being satisfied. You going to traipse all around like you haves to find something lost. You going to work yourself up with excitement. Your heart going to bear hard enough to kill you because you don’t love and don’t have peace. And then some day you going to bust loose and be ruined. Won’t nothing help you then.”
― Carson McCullers, The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter

“She stood in front of the mirror a long time, and finally decided she either looked like a sap or else she looked very beautiful. One of the other.
Six different ways she tried out her hair. The cowlicks were a little trouble, so she wet her bangs and made three spit curls.
Last of all she stuck the rhinestones on her hair and put on plenty of lipstick and paint. When she finished she lifted up her chin and half-closed eyes like a movie star. Slowly she turned her face from one side to the other. It was beautiful she looked - just beautiful.
She didn’t feel herself at all. She was somebody different from Mick Kelly entirely. Two hours to pass before the party would begin, and she was ashamed for any of her family to see her dressed so far ahead of time. She went into the bathroom again and locked the door. She couldn’t mess up her dress by sitting down, so she stood in the middle of the floor. She felt so different from the old Mick Kelly that she knew this would be better than anything else in her whole life.”
― Carson McCullers, The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter

“I wonder has Harry still got his gold piece,’ Spareribs said.
‘What gold piece?’
‘When a Jew boy is born they put a gold piece in the bank for him. That’s what Jews do.’
‘Shucks. You got it mixed up,’ she said (Mick). ‘It’s Catholics you’re thinking about. Catholics buy a pistol for a baby soon as it’s born. Some day the Catholics mean to start a war and kill everybody else.’
‘Nuns give me a funny feeling,’ Spareribs said. ‘It scares me when I see one on the street.”
― Carson McCullers, The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter

“I made acquaintance of a maid she had an eye for me she like my innocent face. She was an older woman, some kind of Scandinavian wore hair in braids. She was no great shakes but she had her own room and late one night I was admitted and led up all the flights of this mansion and brought to a small bathroom top floor at the back. She sat me in a claw-foot tub and gave me a bath, this hefty hot steaming red-faced woman. I don’t remember her name Hilda Bertha something like that, and she knows herself well before we make love she pulls a pillow over her head to muffle the noise she makes and it is really interesting to go at this great chunky energetic big-bellied soft-assed flop-titted but headless woman, teasing it with a touch, watching it quiver, hearing its muffled squeaks, composing a fuck for it, the likes of which I like to imagine she has never known.”
― E.L. Doctorow, E.L. Doctorow's Ragtime

“He was six feet two inches tall, two hundred and ten pounds of finely trained muscle, with blond shining hair falling down his neck, and standing there in the kitchen between those plaster walls and that skinny wife and those ruined children, it was like his body had somehow managed to suck all that had ever been handsome or strong or alive right out of his wife and out of the children and out of the house itself. The little boy smiled his bad teeth at his daddy, and Muscle only shook his head and then went down the hallway on his machine-smooth stride.”
― Harry Crews, Gypsys Curse

“I want to say thank you,’ he said with earnestness, after which he drew his right hand out of the bear-glove and held it out to me, and as we shook hands and looked at each other, I knew that from now on this man would be willing to die for me, as no one had ever been before, with the possible exception of my parents, but I could not remember any of that and oddly enough, this was such a huge change between us, it was almost impossible to bear, I could see into him, we were now one person, I didn’t even think of him as Russian and of myself as Finnish, or that this was not peace, but war, as I ought to have done.”
― Roy Jacobsen, The Burnt-Out Town of Miracles

“Tompkins Square Park. The Park is crowded. This is not 14th street, this is the community. There is a music phenomenon coming out of hundreds of transistor radios. There is a mamba phenomenon. There is a dog phenomenon- there are dogs in the dog run taking craps, dogs on the leash, dogs roaming free in packs. Men and girls playing handball in the fenced-in handball courts. The girls are good. They shout in Spanish. Dogs jump for the ball in the handball courts. In the benches of the park sit old Ukrainian ladies with babushkas. The old ladies have small yapping dogs on leashes. Old men play chess at tables. The old dogs of the men lie under the stone tables with their tongues hanging. On the big dirt hill in the centre of the park, a kid and a dog roll over each other. A burned-out head drifts by, barefoot with his feet red and swollen. A dog growls at him. Down the path from the old ladies in babushkas sits one blond-haired girl on the pipe fence. Four black guys surround her. One talks to her earnestly. She stares straight ahead. Her radio plays Aretha. Her dog sleeps at the end of its leash. Benches are turned over, a group of hippies huddles around the guitar, dogs streak back and forth under the bandshell with the zigzag propulsion of pinballs. Two cop cars are parked on 10th street. Mambo, mambo. A thousand radios play rock.”
― E.L. Doctorow, Ragtime

“At a concluding discussion with one school group on the bus leaving Auschwitz Berkenau, he asks “What has the trip taught you?”, I hated the question, but I was required to ask it. I’ve heard all this (the standard answers) before. I know it by heart.
Until one boy says..”I think in order to survive we need to be a little bit Nazi,too.”
― Yishai Sarid, The Memory Monster

“And behind them a little bull of a man came walking. He wore a mine cap with a carbide lamp atop. Thick his chest was, and a fleece of black hairs came curling out of his shirt.
He took off his cap and his head was as clean as a shaven jaw.
I thought how I would tell Uncle Jolly and Grandma about him. I spoke the words aloud to know their sound.
“A fella not five feet high came along, and I skeered him proper. A low standing fella.
Oh, he was a little keg of a man, round and thick, and double jinted.
A mountycat he thought I was, fixing to spring.”
― James Still, River of Earth

“I would tell you the safe procedure to avoid lightning while on an exposed ridge, but I see no reason you should not learn it as I did. If you get tweaked by God’s electric finger, I can hardly be to blame. You are a fat-assed nerd anyway, incapable of running more than three miles without the last rites. You, fart-brain, are a reader, and the only thing I despise more, is a writer, who simply ought to announce himself as a public masturbator and be done with it. But I am telling you my story, you are listening, so we have a truce, if not respect. I am a writer, you are a reader, and if there were a God, he might be amused to have mercy on our souls. Or piss on them. In long electric streaks.”
― Howard McCord, The Man Who Walked to the Moon: A Novella

“The summer we were fifteen, Dan discovered an old suitcase of his father’s liqueur miniatures. The suitcase had been on the back porch for years and it was like coming on a hidden treasure chest. They looked like jewels, exquisite shapes of glass glowing ruby, Amber, creme-de-menthe emerald.
We’d sneak back there on June evenings with the light out in the kitchen and Dan’s parents in the front of the apartment watching TV. I had a penlight and we’d study the labels before sampling. It brought the world into our lives as no geography book ever could. From necks narrower than a straw drops of exotic places burned on our tongues: Cognac, Chartreuse, Curaçao.”
― Stuart Dybek, Childhood and Other Neighborhoods: Stories

“In high school the priests had cautioned us against the danger of books.
“The wrong ones will warp your mind more than it already is, Marzek”.
I tried to find out what the wrong ones were so that I could read them. I had already developed my basic principle of Catholic education-The Double Reverse: (1) suspect what they teach you, (2) study what they condemn ”
― Stuart Dybek, Childhood and Other Neighborhoods: Stories

“In addition they travelled maddening distances between games with very few rest days, in a schedule to suit the counties they played rather than logic. Though no Test matches, the tour finished in Bristol with a game against a Gloucestershire team including WG and Gilbert Jessop.

The captain of England at the time was Pelham 'Plum' Warner, who wrote..

There is a case in point of the extraordinary power the game has over its votaries in this matter of sinking all prejudices and dislike, real or imaginary, in the tour in the United Kingdom of a team from India composed of men of all castes and creeds. I make so bold as to say that this travelling and living together of natives of various castes and creeds will have far-reaching effect in India.

”
― Prashant Kidambi, Cricket Country: An Indian Odyssey in the Age of Empire

“Under the monstrous flesh of Mrs Biggs, the Tsar lay pinned like a moth on the sofa, bony knees splitting the air, thighs splayed out to take her awful weight. I could not breathe. Wave upon wave of fear and joy swept over me. Like an oiled snake, deep delving and twisting, Mrs Biggs poisoned him slowly, rearing and stabbing him convulsively. Her body writhed gently and was still. Ignoring the woman above him the grey Tsar lay as if dead, pinioned limply, eyes wide and staring, speared in an act of contrition. Full-blown love eddied from the woman, blowzy hips sunk in weariness, litmus flesh soaking up virtue from the body beneath.”
― Beryl Bainbridge, Harriet Said...

“I had never before been so tortured by the slowness of the Mexico City traffic; the irritability of the drivers; the savagery of the dilapidated trucks that ought to have been banned ages ago; the sadness of the begging mothers carrying children in their shawls and extending their calloused hands; the awfulness of the crippled and the blind asking for alms; the melancholy of the children in clown costumes trying to entertain with their painted faces and the little balls they juggled; the insolence and obscene bungling of the pot-bellied police officers leaning against their motorcycles at strategic highway entrances and exits to collect their bite-size bribes; the insolent pathways cleared for the powerful people in their bulletproof limousines; the desperate, self-absorbed, and absent gaze of old people unsteadily crossing side streets without looking where they were going, those white-haired, but-faced men and women resigned to die the same way as they lived; the giant billboards advertising an imaginary world of bras and underpants covering small swaths of perfect bodies with white skin and blonde hair, high-priced shops selling luxury and enchanted vacations in promised paradises.”
― Carlos Fuentes , Vlad

“The Butcher appeared with four of the toughest Tonto Macoute plus the Anteater, also known as Hormigonera, or the Kid Sniffer. She was rumoured to have been brought up by wolves and had the longest nose in all of Balaal. She was semi-feral and would be paid only in raw meat.
Like most of Balaal’s population, she was of an unknown age. Her limbs were stick-thin and she had a limp from where a child had stabbed her with a knife, but she possessed a great, distended belly from all the meat she had consumed, and her face was as smooth as a peach save for two vertical lines between her eyebrows. She wore a washerwoman’s rags and a pair of runner chinelos, from which her fat, filthy toes protruded like slugs.”
― J.J. Amaworo Wilson, Nazare

“Dear Moldenke,
Whether or not you have feelings for me, or feelings at all, I do have feelings about you. They increased when you compared my nipples to pencil erasers. No one has been so gentle to me.
The clouds are promising rain.
Love, Cock Roberta.”
― David Ohle, Motorman

“One of my teachers said that borders are particularly odious in the mountains, because on both sides of the watershed the same grain is cultivated, the same beasts graze, they have the same customs..”
― Paolo Cognetti, Without Ever Reaching the Summit: A Journey

“Bad news about Ray Warren,’ Mickey said. ‘Or for him. Or for us, temporarily.’
‘What’s that Mickey?’ I asked him.
‘His old lady. He phoned last night. She snuffed it. He’s staying up there for a few days, until after they’ve put her in the ground.’
‘Sorry to hear it,’ I said.
‘Yeah, I knew you would be,’ Mickey said. ‘You want me to organise a wreath?’.
‘Yes, I should do that.’
‘Shall I get two made up while I’m at it?’ he said.”
― Ted Lewis, GBH

“In Poe’s story the keeper had no name but the dog did, Neptune. ‘Large as he is,’ says the lighthouse keeper, Neptune ‘is not to be taken into consideration as ‘society’. Would to Heaven I had ever found in ‘society’ one half so much faith as in this poor dog:- in such case i and ‘society’ might never have parted’. Neptune is the name of the Roman god or the seas, me the dog in Pope’s story is a water dog, the keeper’s only companion. He doesn’t take the place of society, he exceeds it. He is unadulterated company. Pure company.”
― Jazmina Barrera, On Lighthouses

“An old man sits in a field in a forgotten and no longer looked after part of the village cemetery. He has outlived most of his contemporaries. His sight is going, he sees just blurs, but can hear well, and listens to the birds, and the sounds of the dead talking from below, the people he knew in his life.”
― Robert Seethaler, The Field