Thomas Griesedieck > Thomas's Quotes

“A stewardess took a special and personal interest in me. She was a little bigger than they usually are, and a little older than the norm. She was styled for abundant lactation, and her uniform blouse was not. She had a big white smile and she was mildly bovine,”
― John D. MacDonald, The Deep Blue Good-By

“They had come to praise him.
"It was so beautiful, so comical, so true to life!" the doctor said.
The little girl gave him the flowers and the Mayor embraced him lightly. "Oh, we thought, signore," he said, "that you were merely a poet.”
― John Cheever, The Stories of John Cheever (Pulitzer Prize Winner)

“I was forbidden to go to the theater on Friday, but I spent all day Saturday there, and on Saturday the picture ended its run. The picture was about the substitution of automobiles for horse-drawn fire engines. Four fire companies were involved. Three of the teams by replaced by engines and the miserable horses had been sold to brutes. One team remained, but its days were numbered. The men and the horses were sad. Then suddenly there was a great fire. One saw the first engine, the second, and the third race off to the conflagration. Back at the horse-drawn company, things were very gloomy. Then the fourth alarm rang-it was their summons- and they sprang into action, harnessed the team and galloped across the city. They put out the fire, saved the city, and were given amnesty by the Mayor. Now on the stage Ozamanides was writing something obscene on my wife’s buttocks.”
― John Cheever, The Stories of John Cheever (Pulitzer Prize Winner)

“Goodbye, Daddy," I said, and I went down the stairs and got my train, and that was the last time I saw my father.”
― John Cheever, The Stories of John Cheever (Pulitzer Prize Winner)

“People need people, more than any other being needs any other being, and Jack thought as he sifted the remnants of the nightmare that the need makes us particularly vulnerable.”
― Peter Heller, The Guide

“It was not as if they lived, exactly, but maybe they were not lost forever to the great dark. That they endured in the weather and the seasons.”
― Peter Heller, The Guide

“So, yeah—I suppose I’ve done some bad things in my life. But I just can’t see myself as a fucking pornographer.”
― Max Allan Collins, Quarry's Climax

“Clement said it was like conditioning, prepar-ing for the ball-clutching moments of life while building your sphincter muscle. After lying in front of a freight train you can lie in bed in your underwear while two cops are visiting, asking about a certain black Buick—and while a mean-looking Walther P.38 automatic is hidden nearby at that very moment—and not worry about making doo-doo in the bed.”
― Elmore Leonard, City Primeval: High Noon in Detroit

“The simplest way to explain the behaviour of any bureaucratic organisation is to assume that it is controlled by a cabal of its enemies. —Robert Conquest’s third law of politics”
― Mick Herron, Slough House

“The air in the house shifted, a rearrangement she could feel even in the study.”
― Mick Herron, Slough House

“The silence grew closer, as if the effort someone was making to be quiet were inching through the house.”
― Mick Herron, Slough House

“I have experienced all kinds of foolish melancholy—I’ve been homesick for countries I’ve never seen, and longed to be what I couldn’t be—but all these moods were trivial compared to my premonition of death.”
― John Cheever, The Stories of John Cheever

“In company, Charles Sheridan always spoke contemptuously of television. “By Jove,” he would say, “I don’t see how anyone can look at that trash. It must be a year since I’ve turned our set on.” Now his wife could hear him laughing uproariously.”
― John Cheever, The Stories of John Cheever

“And he recognized that he was separated only by a pane of glass from a life that was as strange to him as life on the moon.”
― John Cheever, The Stories of John Cheever

“The people in the Farquarsons’ living room seemed united in their tacit claim that there had been no past, no war—that there was no danger or trouble in the world.”
― John Cheever, The Stories of John Cheever

“In my father’s last letter he said that the world is run by those willing to take the responsibility for the running of it. If it is life that you feel you are missing I can tell you where to find it. In the law courts, in business, in government. There is nothing occurring in the streets. Nothing but a dumbshow composed of the helpless and the impotent.”
― Cormac McCarthy, Suttree

“The uncle narrowed his eyes at Suttree. No need to get on your high horse with me, he said. At least I was never in the goddamned penitentiary. Suttree smiled. The workhouse, John. It’s a little different. But I am what I am.”
― Cormac McCarthy, Suttree

“Somebody has been fuckin my watermelons.”
― Cormac McCarthy, Suttree

“Mr. Suttree it is our understanding that at curfew rightly decreed by law and in that hour wherein night draws to its proper close and the new day commences and contrary to conduct befitting a person of your station you betook yourself to various low places within the shire of McAnally and there did squander several ensuing years in the company of thieves, derelicts, miscreants, pariahs, poltroons, spalpeens, curmudgeons, clotpolls, murderers, gamblers, bawds, whores, trulls, brigands, topers, tosspots, sots and archsots, lobcocks, smellsmocks, runagates, rakes, and other assorted and felonious debauchees.

I was drunk, cried Suttree.”
― Cormac McCarthy, Suttree

“When I agreed to call him about lunch he gave me his telephone number at the shipyard, his extension there, the telephone number of his apartment, the telephone number of a cottage he had in Connecticut, and the telephone number of the club where he lunched and played cards. I wrote all these numbers on a piece of paper and when we said goodbye I dropped the paper into a wastebasket.”
― John Cheever, The Stories of John Cheever

“Harrogate grinned uneasily. They tried to get me for beast, beast … Bestiality? Yeah. But my lawyer told em a watermelon wasnt no beast. He was a smart son of a bitch. Oh boy, said Suttree.”
― Cormac McCarthy, Suttree

“I gave him a ten-dollar bill and asked him to get me some bourbon. “I don’t think they have bourbon,” he said. “Well, then, Scotch,” I said. “They drink mostly wine in the neighborhood,” Peter said. Then I settled on him a clear, kindly gaze, thinking that I would have him murdered.”
― John Cheever, The Stories of John Cheever

“This is the house where the dead lived. It is gone, lost and gone.”
― Cormac McCarthy, Suttree

“Death is what the living carry with them. A state of dread, like some uncanny foretaste of a bitter memory. But the dead do not remember and nothingness is not a curse. Far from it.”
― Cormac McCarthy, Suttree

“They wheeled Suttree on. Bearing his pained bones in their boat of flesh. To where the deadcarriage waits in the dark. Perhaps the wrath of God after all.”
― Cormac McCarthy, Suttree

“Why did Jesus weep? said Suttree. Eh? He pointed up at the sign. Why did Jesus weep? Dont know scriptures? Some. He wept over folks workin on Sundays. Suttree smiled.”
― Cormac McCarthy, Suttree

“You see a man, he scratchin to make it. Think once he got it made everthing be all right. But you dont never have it made. Dont care who you are. Look up one mornin and you a old man. You aint got nothin to say to your brother. Dont know no more’n when you started.”
― Cormac McCarthy, Suttree

“Everywhere hung portraits of blacks, strange family groups where the faces watched gravely from out of their paper past. Hanging in the dark like galleries of condemned.”
― Cormac McCarthy, Suttree

“Recurrences of dreams he’d had in the mountains came and went and the second night he woke from uneasy sleep and lay in the world alone.”
― Cormac McCarthy, Suttree

“The girls emerged in their carboncopy dresses and the boy came out of the woods stiffly and looking churlish and sullen and strange, like a child pervert.”
― Cormac McCarthy, Suttree