Matt > Matt's Quotes

“When they dreamed of turning iron and metal into gold, they called it alchemy. The much more far-fetched dream of turning bound sheafs of plain paper into fortunes, they call publishing.”
― Matthew Pearl, The Last Bookaneer

“Before I could do any sleuthing, though, I still had the question of Uncle Louis.”
― Christy Fifield, Murder Buys a T-shirt

“I was looking for something else in books. I could not really say what, but I think I can say why: a notion started in my own brain was probably wrong, but an answer read in a work of literature would be right. That was my conviction at nineteen, and only in later years would I come to trust myself over a book.”
― Matthew Pearl, The Last Bookaneer

“These writers take the essence of every person around them, turn them into books and stories without permission or even a simple thank-you, and want all the credit and glory for themselves.”
― Matthew Pearl, The Last Bookaneer

“What they don't realize is that sequels are bound to disappoint those who have waited for them.”
― Matthew Pearl, The Last Bookaneer

“Recall that when the first presses produced copies of the Bible, the scribes who had to spend years at a time on the same work, just as it had been done for centuries, streamed out from the monasteries with quills raised in the air, decrying the work of the devil. When one of the pioneering tradesmen printed certain words in red ink to emphasize them, it was proof that he had used his own blood. That was why the printers’ assistants began to be called “devils.” Soon printers were threatened with burning, and some were indeed put into the fire along with their equipment. From the beginning, the creation of the modern book was viewed as the work of Satan—an attempt to usurp the word of God.”
― Matthew Pearl, The Last Bookaneer

“Books inspire a man to embrace the world or flee it. They start wars and end them. They make the men and women who write and publish them vast fortunes, and nearly as quickly can drive them into madness and despair. Stay away from what you do not fathom from now on...”
― Matthew Pearl, The Last Bookaneer

“A man's library opens up his character to the world.”
― Matthew Pearl, The Last Bookaneer

“What's the use of having eyes if we can't see the world we pass through?”
― Matthew Pearl, The Last Bookaneer

“Avoid the Holy Grail, the heroic journeys, the pursuit of a legend--that is not the life of the bookaneer, who must keep his eyes on the ground while other book people live by dreaming.”
― Matthew Pearl, The Last Bookaneer

“The same thing as you, the same as she. The same as anyone who has ever been doubted or told to go away. To prove myself better.”
― Matthew Pearl, The Last Bookaneer

“An obscure character by the name of Belial. He is interpreted as a minion of the devil by some scholars, but that is wrong. It is ignorance. The name means, literally speaking, 'one who cannot be yoked,' and it is really every one of us who takes control of our own destiny while others blow in the wind. We may be punished for it, but we would never do it another way. We are all Belials.”
― Matthew Pearl, The Last Bookaneer

“Blessed with the Beta Male imagination, he spent much of his life squinting into the future so he might spot ways in which the world was conspiring to kill him...”
― Christopher Moore, A Dirty Job

“But Charlie could imagine, because he was a Beta Male, and imagination was his curse....”
― Christopher Moore, A Dirty Job

“One of them hissed-not the hiss of a cat, a long, steady tone-more like the hiss of air escaping the rubber raft that is all that lies between you and a dark sea full of sharks, the hiss of your life leaking out at the seams. ”
― Christopher Moore, A Dirty Job

“There are two kinds of people, those who like to sleep next to the wall, and those who like to sleep next to the people who push them off the bed.”
― Etgar Keret, The Bus Driver Who Wanted to be God and Other Stories

“So if you're really unhappy down there, and if all kinds of people are telling you that you're suffering from severe perceptual disorders, look for your own way of getting here, and when you find it, could you please bring some cards, 'cause we're getting pretty tired of the marbles. - from "Pipes”
― Etgar Keret, The Bus Driver Who Wanted to be God and Other Stories

“I saw my life branching out before me like the green fig tree in the story. From the tip of every branch, like a fat purple fig, a wonderful future beckoned and winked. One fig was a husband and a happy home and children, and another fig was a famous poet and another fig was a brilliant professor, and another fig was Ee Gee, the amazing editor, and another fig was Europe and Africa and South America, and another fig was Constantin and Socrates and Attila and a pack of other lovers with queer names and offbeat professions, and another fig was an Olympic lady crew champion, and beyond and above these figs were many more figs I couldn't quite make out. I saw myself sitting in the crotch of this fig tree, starving to death, just because I couldn't make up my mind which of the figs I would choose. I wanted each and every one of them, but choosing one meant losing all the rest, and, as I sat there, unable to decide, the figs began to wrinkle and go black, and, one by one, they plopped to the ground at my feet.”
― Sylvia Plath, The Bell Jar

“You hear it most when politicians who live in places like Hyannis Port and Beacon Hill and Wellesley make decisions that affect people who live in Dorchester and Roxbury and Jamaica Plain, and then step back and say there isn’t a war going on. There is a war going on. It’s happening in playgrounds, not health clubs. It’s fought on cement, not lawns. It’s fought with pipes and bottles, and lately, automatic weapons. And as long as it doesn’t push through the heavy oak doors where they fight with prep school educations and filibusters and two-martini lunches, it will never actually exist.”
― Dennis Lehane, A Drink Before the War

“I'm a detective, but nuns could stonewall Sam Spade into an asylum”
― Dennis Lehane, A Drink Before the War

“L.A. burns, and so many other cities smolder, waiting for the hose that will flood gasoline over the coals, and we listen to politicians who fuel our hate and our narrow views and tell us it's simply a matter of getting back to basics while they sit in their beachfront properties and listen to the surf so they won't have to hear the screams of the drowning.”
― Dennis Lehane, A Drink Before the War

“It never works that way. Once that ugliness has been forced into you, it becomes part of your blood, dilutes it, races through your heart and back out again, staining everything as it goes. The ugliness never goes away, never comes out, no matter what you do. Anyone who thinks otherwise is naive. All you can do is hope to control it.”
― Dennis Lehane, A Drink Before the War

“But always in the back of your throat is this scream, barely suppressed.”
― Dennis Lehane, Darkness, Take My Hand

“A train will bring you back to the place you came from, but it will not return you home.”
― Jedediah Berry, The Manual of Detection

“Lest details be mistaken for clues, note that Mr. Charles Unwin, lifetime resident of the city, rode his bicycle to work every day, even when it was raining.”
― Jedediah Berry, The Manual of Detection

“Though inconspicuous by nature, as a bicyclist and an umbrellist Unwin was severely evident.”
― Jedediah Berry, The Manual of Detection

“...and in this draft the word "promotion" appeared always between quotation marks, for to let it stand without qualification would be to honor it with too much validity.”
― Jedediah Berry, The Manual of Detection

“Any form of government, not just Capitalism, is whatever people who have all our money, drunk or sober, sane or insane, decide to do today.”
― Kurt Vonnegut Jr., Hocus Pocus

“Just because you can read, write and do a little math, doesn't mean that you're entitled to conquer the universe.”
― Kurt Vonnegut, Hocus Pocus

“It appeared to the Elders that the people here would believe anything about themselves, no matter how preposterous, as long as it was flattering. To make sure of this, they performed an experiment. They put the idea into Earthlings' heads that the whole Universe had been created by one big animal who looked just like them. He sat on a throne with a lot of less fancy thrones all around him. When people died they got to sit on those other thrones forever because they were such close relatives of the Creator.
The people down here just ate that up!”
― Kurt Vonnegut, Hocus Pocus