Dave > Dave's Quotes

“I know what every colored woman in this country is doing... Dying. Just like me. But the difference is they dying like a stump. Me, I’m going down like one of those redwoods. I sure did live in this world.”
― Toni Morrison

“The Wart’s own special one was called Cavall, and he happened to be licking Cavall’s nose - not the other way about - when Merlyn came in and found him.
That will be regarded as an unsanitary habit,” said Merlyn, “though I cannot see it myself. After all, God made the creature’s nose just as well as he made your tongue.”
― T.H. White

“Kay was older and bigger than the Wart, so that he was bound to win in the end, but he was more nervous and imaginative. He could imagine the effect of each blow that was aimed at him, and this weakened his defense. Wart was only an infuriated hurricane.”
― T.H. White

“And into its bland merciless face what did he have to show as his proof that he deserved to live?
- Nothing but that he was afraid to die.”
― Rafael Yglesias, Fearless

“Re: Central Park
But the height proved the awesome truth that the park was made by man: nature re-created where it had been killed.”
― Rafael Yglesias, Fearless

“You know, one of the tragedies of real life is that there is no background music.”
― Annie Proulx

“... there are four women in every man’s heart. The Maid in the Meadow, the Demon Lover, the Stouthearted Woman, the Tall and Quiet Woman.”
― Annie Proulx

“Ordinary parties, he thought, were subtle games of sexual and social badminton...”
― Annie Proulx

“Among adults – and among orphans – Wilbur Larch noted that delirious happiness was rare.”
― John Irving, The Cider House Rules

“Here in St. Cloud’s,” Dr. Larch wrote, “ I have been given the choice of playing God or leaving practically everything up to chance. It is my experience that practically everything is left up to chance much of the time; men who believe in good and evil, and who believe that good should win, should watch for those moments when it is possible to play God – we should seize those moments. There won’t be may”
― John Irving, The Cider House Rules

“The powerful wind swept his hair away from his face; he leaned his chest into the wind, as if he stood on the deck of a ship heading into the wind, slicing through the waves of an ocean he’d not yet seen.”
― John Irving, The Cider House Rules

“Grant us safe lodging, and holy rest,” Mrs. Grogan was saying, “and peace at last.” Amen, thought Wilbur Larch, the Saint of St. Cloud’s, who was seventy-something, and an ether addict, and who felt that he’d come a long way and still had a long way to go.”
― John Irving, The Cider House Rules

“… but only because exhaustion is a life-sign; it is at least a form of being human.”
― John Irving, The Cider House Rules

“… and so he tried to accept the ache in his heart as what Dr. Larch would call the common symptoms of normal life.”
― John Irving, The Cider House Rules

“This is a writer’s lesson:
To learn that the sounds that we imagine can be the clearest, loudest sounds of all.”
― John Irving, Trying to Save Piggy Sneed

“We will often do anything to pretend that nothing is on our minds.”
― John Irving, Trying to Save Piggy Sneed

“We often need to lose sight of our priorities in order to see them.”
― John Irving, Trying to Save Piggy Sneed

“You cannot drive with your eyes in the rear-view mirror… But dignity is difficult to maintain. Stamina requires constant upkeep. Repetition is boring. And you pay for grace.”
― John Irving, Trying to Save Piggy Sneed

“Unconsciously we all have a standard by which we measure other men, and if we examine closely we find that this standard is a very simple one, and is this: we admire them, we envy them, for great qualities we ourselves lack. Hero worship consists in just that. Our heroes are men who do things which we recognize, with regret, and sometimes with a secret shame, that we cannot do. We find not much in ourselves to admire, we are always privately wanting to be like somebody else. If everybody was satisfied with himself, there would be no heroes.”
― Mark Twain

“He who makes a beast of himself gets rid of the pain of being a man.”
― Samuel Johnson

“Love her as in childhood
Through feeble, old and grey.
For you’ll never miss a mother’s love
Till she’s buried beneath the clay.”
― Frank McCourt, Angela’s Ashes

“There’s no use saying anything in the schoolyard because there’s always someone with an answer and there’s nothing you can do but punch them in the nose and if you were to punch everyone who has an answer you’d be punching morning noon and night.”
― Frank McCourt, Angela’s Ashes

“I say, Billy, what’s the use in playing croquet when you’re doomed?
He says, Frankie, what’s the use of not playing croquet when you’re doomed?”
― Frank McCourt, Angela’s Ashes

“It’s lovely to know that the world can’t interfere with the inside of your head.”
― Frank McCourt, Angela’s Ashes

“He says, you have to study and learn so that you can make up your own mind about history and everything else but you can’t make up an empty mind. Stock your mind, stock your mind. You might be poor, your shoes might be broken, but your mind is a palace.”
― Frank McCourt, Angela’s Ashes

“I knew that I shouldn’t have, but I did it all the same; and there you have my epitaph, or one of them, because my grave is going to require a monument inscribed on all four sides with rueful mottoes, in small characters, set close together.”
― Michael Chabon, Wonder Boys

“I’m a man who falls in love so easily, and with such reckless lack of consideration for the consequences of my actions, that from the very first instant of entering into a marriage I become, almost by definition, an adulterer.”
― Michael Chabon, Wonder Boys

“There's nothing more embarrassing than to have earned the disfavor of a perceptive animal.”
― Michael Chabon, Wonder Boys

“I don’t mean to make a big deal out of sobriety, by the way. Of all the modes of human consciousness available to the modern consumer I consider it to be the most overrated.”
― Michael Chabon, Wonder Boys

“I’d spent my whole life waiting to awake on an ordinary morning in the town that was destined to be my home, in the arms of the woman I was destined to love, knowing the people and doing the work that would make up the changing but essentially invariable landscape of my particular destiny. ”
― Michael Chabon, Wonder Boys