David Rollins > David's Quotes

“...
    'How old is he?' the policeman asked Mrs. Reilly.
    'I am thirty,' Ignatius said condescendingly.
    'You got a job?'
    'Ignatius hasta help me at home,' Mrs. Reilly said. Her initial courage was failing a little, and she began to twist the lute string with the cord on the cake boxes. 'I got terrible arthuritis.'
    'I dust a bit,' Ignatius told the policeman. 'In addition, I am at the moment writing a lengthy indictment against our century. When my brain begins to reel from my literary labors, I make an occasional cheese dip.'
...”
― John Kennedy Toole, A Confederacy of Dunces

“Before, I wandered as a diversion. Now I wander seriously and sit and read as a diversion.”
― Walker Percy, The Moviegoer

“Not to be onto something is to be in despair.”
― Walker Percy, The Moviegoer

“I have discovered that most people have no one to talk to, no one, that is, who really wants to listen. When it does at last dawn on a man that you really want to hear about his business, the look that comes over his face is something to see.”
― Walker Percy, The Moviegoer

“Ooooh," Kate groans, Kate herself now. "I'm so afraid."
"I know."
"What am I going to do?"
"You mean right now?"
"Yes."
"We'll go to my car. Then we'll drive down to the French Market and get some coffee. Then we'll go home."
"Is everything going to be all right?"
"Yes."
"Tell me. Say it."
"Everything is going to be all right.”
― Walker Percy, The Moviegoer

“i had spent four years propped on the front porch of the fraternity house, bemused and dreaming, watching the sun shine through the spanish moss, lost in the mystery of finding myself alive at such a time and place.”
― Walker Percy, The Moviegoer

“Nothing remains but desire, and desire comes howling down Elysian Fields like a mistral.”
― Walker Percy, The Moviegoer

“...having only learned to recognize merde when I see it, having inherited no more from my father than a good nose for merde, for every species of shit that flies--my only talent--smelling merde from every quarter, living in fact in the very century of merde, the great shithouse of scientific humanism where needs are satisfied, everyone becomes an anyone, a warm and creative person, and prospers like a dung beetle...”
― Walker Percy, The Moviegoer

“It is not a bad thing to settle for the Little Way, not the big search for the big happiness but the sad little happiness of drinks and kisses, a good little car and a warm deep thigh.”
― Walker Percy, The Moviegoer

“All colors made me happy: even gray.
My eyes were such that literally they
Took photographs. ”
― Vladimir Nabokov, Pale Fire

“I was weeping again, drunk on the impossible past.”
― Vladimir Nabokov

“When that slow-motion, silent explosion of love takes place in me, unfolding its melting fringes and overwhelming me with the sense of something much vaster, much more enduring and powerful than the accumulation of matter or energy in any imaginable cosmos, then my mind cannot but pinch itself to see if it is really awake. I have to make a rapid inventory of the universe, just as a man in a dream tries to condone the absurdity of his position by making sure he is dreaming. I have to have all space and all time participate in my emotion, in my mortal love, so that the edge of its mortality is taken off, thus helping me to fight the utter degradation, ridicule, and horror of having developed an infinity of sensation and thought within a finite existence.”
― Vladimir Nabokov

“Thinking of Rooie, he was not entirely alone. He'd even chosen a hotel that he thought Rooie would have liked. Although it was not the most expensive hotel in Zurich, it was too expensive for a cop. But Harry had traveled so little that he'd saved a fair amount of money. He didn't expect the 2nd District to pay for his room at the Hotel Zum Storchen, not even for one night, yet that was where he wanted to stay. It was a charmingly romantic hotel on the banks of the Limmat, and Harry chose a room that looked across the river at the floodlit Rathaus.”
― John Irving, A Widow for One Year

“Three nights at the Hotel zum Storchen --- a decent hotel", Farrokh explained. "Your room overlooks the Limmat. You can walk in the old town, or to the lake. Have you ever been in Europe?”
― John Irving, A Son of the Circus

“But just let me tell you something, son, a woman's love is like the morning dew, it's just as apt to settle on a horse turd as it is on a rose. So you better just get over it.”
― Larry McMurtry, Leaving Cheyenne

“Hell, you ought to go see a doctor, Dad," I told him. "You probably just need some kind of pep-up medicine. Why do you want to be so contrary?" "I ain't contrary," he said. "I just don't want to pay no doctor to tell me what I already know. There ain't no medicine for old age." "You're just tight," I said. "You ought not to let a few dollars stand between you and your health." "I am tight," he said. "I'm rich, too." "You don't live like it," I said. "No, because I want to stay rich. The best way in the world to get poor is to start living rich.”
― Larry McMurtry, Leaving Cheyenne

“I could hear [the old ladies from Thalia] whispering how Granddad had gone to a better place. They could think and go to hell; I didn't believe it. Not unless dirt is a better place than air.”
― Larry McMurtry, Horseman, Pass By

“They had a sweety-sweet picture of Jesus over the choir booths that I didn't like at all. Jesus looked like he was a Boy Scout, waiting to get his twenty-first merit badge from the head Scout Master.”
― Larry McMurtry, Horseman, Pass By

“It’s almost impossible to save, really save, anything. If she didn’t have her trust fund, small though it is, well, they might be peering over the edge the way some couples their age were. Thank God for that quarterly check. And thank God for Daddy, even if he was a lush and spent more nights in bed with prostitutes than with mother. According to mother.”
― A.C. Greene , The Highland Park Woman: A Collection of Short Stories

“Dallas is small enough: Highland Park is like living in a retirement home when it comes to knowing what everyone is doing.”
― A.C. Greene, The Highland Park Woman: A Collection of Short Stories

“It's not really necessary: a ten-year-old son in St. Mark's and a seven-year-old daughter in Lamplighter, three bedrooms and three baths at one end of Beverly Drive, her station wagon, his Toronado.”
― A.C. Greene, The Highland Park Woman: A Collection of Short Stories

“Bob sat there stoned, his mind alternating between fantasies of gnawing on Hank's little fingers and pushing away the growing anxiety of graduation, with its implicit promises of a nine-to-five job, IRS-whittled paychecks, screaming kids, car in the shop, Pop in Ma's doghouse again, and settling into an easy chair watching the Reds and drinking a Schlitz for season after season until none of the kids could be sure where the chair ended and Pop began. And so on until death.
Bob thought, If that guy can do it, I can. I'm going to learn to play the guitar.”
― Matthew Cutter, Closer You Are: The Story of Robert Pollard and Guided By Voices

“I don't know why you would even want to stay with me," I said.
T.R. looked stunned for a second and then whipped her elbow into my side as hard as she could--months later it was determined that the jab cracked a rib.
Oh, get fucked!" she said, jumping up. "No wonder you don't have no girlfriend if you don't have no more feelings than to say a horrible thing like that. All I want to do is love you. Ain't you even gonna let me?”
― Larry McMurtry, Some Can Whistle