Status Updates From The Rum Diary

Are you here for good? I said, looking up at Chenault.
She smiled. I don't know. I quit my job in New York. She looked up at the sky. I just want to be happy. I'm happy with Fritz -- so I'm here.
I nodded thoughtfully. Yeah, that seems reasonable.
She laughed. It won't last. Nothing lasts. But I'm happy now.

A man who knew what he was after had damn little time to find it, much less to sit back and explain himself.

A man can live on his wits and his balls for only so long. I'd been doing it for ten years and I had a feeling that my reserve was running low.

I grinned and leaned back in the seat as we drove on. There was a strange and unreal air about the whole world I'd come into. It was amusing and vaguely depressing at the same time.

You sound greedy, I said.
He grinned. I am. There's nobody on the island greedier than me. Sometimes I feel like kicking myself in the balls.

Everybody quits -- you'll quit. Nobody worth a shit can work here.

With the palms zipping past and the big sun burning down on the road ahead, I had a flash of something I hadn't felt since my first months in Europe -- a mixture of ignorance and a loose, what the hell kind of confidence that comes on a man when the wind picks up and he begins to move in a hard straight line toward an unknown horizon.

I have no valid complaint against hustlers, no rational bitch, but the act of selling is repulsive to me. I harbor a secret urge to whack a salesman in the face, crack his teeth and put red bumps around his eyes.

All manner of men came to work for the News: everything from wild young Turks who wanted to rip the world in half and start all over again -- to tired, beer-bellied old hacks who wanted nothing more than to live out their days in peace before a bunch of lunatics ripped the world in half.