Masters of Atlantis Quotes

“Babcock knew no Southerners personally but he had seen them in court often enough...and Ed's manner and appearance said Dixie to him. He imagined Ed at home with his family, a big one, from old geezers to toddlers. He saw them eating their yams and pralines and playing their fiddles and dancing their jigs and guffawing over coarse jokes and beating one another to death with agricultural implements.”
― charles portis, Masters of Atlantis

“I don’t know what position you’re talking about, sir. The Gnomon Society has never questioned the rotundity of the earth. Mr. Jimmerson is himself a skilled topographer."

"Excuse me, Mr. Popper, but I have it right here in Mr. Jimmerson’s own words on page twenty-nine of 101 Gnomon Facts.”

"No, sir. Excuse me but you don’t. Please look again. Read that passage carefully and you’ll see what we actually say is that the earth looks flat. We still say that. It’s so flat around Brownsville as to be striking to the eye.”

"But isn’t that just a weasel way of saying that you really believe if to be flat?"

"Not at all. What we’re saying is that the curvature of the earth is so gentle, relative to our human scale of things, that we need not bother or take it into account when going for a stroll, say, or laying out our gardens.”
― Charles Portis, Masters of Atlantis

“He said he enjoyed doing security work for Mr. Jimmerson, keeping nuts and gangsters out of grenade range of the Master, but that one day he hoped to marry a woman who owned a Jeep with raised white letters on the tires. He would take her home and ride around town some. “Look,” the people would say, “there goes Ed in four-wheel drive, with his pretty wife at his side.” The way to get women, he said, was with a camera. Chloroform was no good, at best a makeshift. But all the girls liked to pose for a camera and became immediately submissive to anyone carrying a great tangle of photographic equipment from his shoulders. You didn’t even need film. He said he had once killed a man when he was in the Great Berets by ramming a pencil up his nose and into his brain.
Babcock said, “It’s the Green Berets.”
"What did I say?"
"You said the Great Berets. But you weren’t in the Green Berets or the Great Berets either one, Ed. I don’t know why you want to say things like that. I’ve seen your records."
"I was in a ward with a guy named Danny who was a Green Beret."
"Yes, but that’s not the same thing.”
― Charles Portis, Masters of Atlantis

“He took Ed for a Southerner and tried to stay clear of him.”
― Charles Portis, Masters of Atlantis

“He knew nothing about Texas trailer law but he suspected that there was no really effective way of removing a person from a trailer in the Rio Grande Valley without the use of firearms or tear gas.”
― Charles Portis, Masters of Atlantis

“Padlock the churches. Bludgeon the dogs. Gas the poets. They outlined the entire program for me”
― Charles Portis, Masters of Atlantis

“It was a Temple that could be hauled away in the night by anyone with a two-inch ball on his car bumper,”
― Charles Portis, Masters of Atlantis

“did you often stagger into the middle of busy intersections with your gummy eyes and make comical, drunken attempts to direct traffic?”
― Charles Portis, Masters of Atlantis

“In a short time he came to like the rum, to prefer it, to demand it. The cheaper and rawer it was, the better he liked it. He reflected on this quirk of human nature and told June Mack, the barmaid, that it was one of God’s most merciful blessings that people grew to love the things that necessity compelled them to eat and drink.”
― Charles Portis, Masters of Atlantis

“Now, you like Texas, Mr. Popper. That's fine. It's just the place for you, a big place, offering plenty of scope for your life of sly maneuver and sudden departure. I think your work is there and I think you should leave us to our work here. - Maurice Babcock, Keeper of the Plumes of the Gnomon Society”
― Charles Portis, Masters of Atlantis