Peter > Peter's Quotes

“The hard necessity of bringing the judge on the bench down into the dock has been the peculiar responsibility of the writer in all ages of man.”
― Nelson Algren, Chicago: City on the Make

“Nothing begets friendship so readily as trouble.”
― Sholom Aleichem

“Words are but the vague shadows of the volumes we mean.  Little audible links, they are, chaining together great inaudible feelings and purposes.”
― Theodore Dreiser

“I have a great deal of experience in justifying myself to myself.”
― Joseph Mitchell

“Stare, pry, listen, eavesdrop. Die knowing something. You are not here long.”
― Walker Evans

“In his own way each man must struggle, lest the moral law become a far-off abstraction utterly separated from his active life.”
― Jane Addams, Twenty Years at Hull House

“Man's hope can paint a purple picture, can transform a soaring vulture into a noble eagle or moaning dove.”
― Ralph Ellison, Invisible Man

“The artistic temperament is particularly unhelpful if it is just that, with no end product.”
― Nick Hornby, Juliet, Naked

“The poor we have always with us, and the purpose of the Lord in providing the poor is to enable us of the better classes to amuse ourselves by investigating them and uplifting them and at dinners telling how charitable we are. The poor don't like it much. They have no gratitude. They would rather be uplifters themselves. But if they are taken firmly in hand they can be kept reasonably dependent and interesting for years.”
― Sinclair Lewis

“This gave him another opportunity to use one of those words that hung before him, shining and alluring. Far away in the distance there were more of them, dangerously sharp. Words that were not for him, but which he used all the same on the sly, and which had an exciting flavour and gave him a tingling feeling in the head. They were a little dangerous, all of them.”
― Tarjei Vesaas, The Birds

“Death is much too high a price to pay for the satisfaction of curiosity, needless to say.”
― Margaret Atwood, The Penelopiad

“I finished the ale, started to order a third one, and decided against it. I'd had enough. More than enough. Or I never would have. You take just so much from a bottle, and then you stop taking. From then on you're putting.”
― Jim Thompson, Savage Night

“The human race has not devised any way of dissolving barriers, getting to know the other chap fast, breaking the ice, that is one-tenth as handy and efficient as letting you and the other chap, or chaps, cease to be totally sober at about the same rate in agreeable surroundings.”
― Kingsley Amis

“To go wrong in one's own way is better than to go right in someone else's.”
― Fyodor Dostoevsky, Crime and Punishment

“Memory in its ordinary way summoned harvested fields, and haycocks and autumn hedges, the first of the fuchsia, the last of the wild sweetpea. It brought the lowing of cattle, old donkeys resting, scampering dogs, and days and places.”
― William Trevor

“She looked at nice young men as if she could smell their stupidity.”
― Flannery O'Connor

“Properly read, the Bible is the most potent force for atheism ever conceived.”
― Isaac Asimov

“Now, you look here! The first thing you got to understand is that all this uplift and flipflop and settlement-work and recreation is nothing in God's world but the entering wedge for socialism. The sooner a man learns he isn't going to be coddled, and he needn't expect a lot of free grub and, uh, all these free classes and flipflop and doodads for his kids unless he earns 'em, why, the sooner he'll get on the job and produce - produce - produce! That's what the country needs, and not all this fancy stuff that just enfeebles the will-power of the working man and gives his kids a lot of notions above their class.”
― Sinclair Lewis, The Man Who Knew Coolidge: Being the Soul of Lowell Schmaltz, Constructive and Nordic Citizen

“Hustlers of the world, there is one mark you cannot beat: the mark inside.”
― William S. Burroughs

“Every good thing that comes is accompanied by trouble.”
― Maxwell Perkins

“I descended into Hell and brought back cheap beer in plastic cups.”
― Eric Lundgren

“Nicotine addicted, persecuted, her day is a maddening circle of tea and biscuits, baking, smoking, the necessary fiction of the housewife.”
― James Claffey, Blood a Cold Blue

“I cannot be weaned/Off the earth's long contour, her river-veins.”
― Seamus Heaney

“It's only those who do nothing that make no mistakes, I suppose.”
― Joseph Conrad, An Outcast of the Islands

“Nothing on earth can make up for the loss of one who has loved you.”
― Selma Lagerlöf

“These are the times that try men's souls.”
― Thomas Paine, The American Crisis

“He had a habit of remarking to bartenders that he didn't see any sense in mixing whiskey with water since the whiskey was already wet.”
― Joseph Mitchell

“I’d like to be remembered as someone who used their ability as a novelist or as a dramatist to say the things he felt needed to be said about the society while being as entertaining as possible. Because if you don’t entertain, nobody’s listening.”
― Budd Schulberg

“I’m an American, I’m a Jew, and I write for all men.”
― Bernard Malamud

“The man does not remember the hand that struck him, the darkness that frightened him, as a child; nevertheless, the hand and darkness remain with him, indivisible from himself forever, part of the passion that drives him wherever he thinks to take flight.”
― James Baldwin