Star Island Quotes

“A quick puke, two rails of blow and she was solid.”
― Carl Hiaasen, Star Island

“On the fifteenth of March, two hours before sunrise, an emergency medical technician named Jimmy Campo found a sweaty stranger huddled in the back of his ambulance. It was parked in a service alley behind the Stefano Hotel, where Jimmy Campo and his partner had been summoned to treat a twenty-two-year-old white female who had swallowed an unwise mix of vodka, Red Bull, hydrocodone, birdseed and stool softener—in all respects a routine South”
― Carl Hiaasen, Star Island

“Baudelaire’s “The Remorse of the Dead.”
― Carl Hiaasen, Star Island

“Skink drank another beer and yowled at the sky. Decades of hermitage had kept him barely on keel but his turbulent aversions never waned. He’d fled the governor’s mansion with his values intact but his idealism extinguished, his patience smashed to dust. Politics had scrambled his soul much worse than the war, and he left behind in Tallahassee not only his name but the discredited strategy of forbearance and compromise. The cherished wild places of his youth vanished under cinder blocks and asphalt, and so, too, had the rest of the state been transformed—hijacked by greedy suckworms disguised as upright citizens. From swampy lairs Skink would strike back wherever an opportunity arose, and the message was never ambiguous. Even schmucks like Jackie Sebago got the point.”
― Carl Hiaasen, Star Island

“Nietzsche?”
― Carl Hiaasen, Star Island

“From then on the sisters were unstoppable, the go-to team for celebrities in mid-flameout. When Cherry Pye's high-paid publicist jumped ship--after accompanying her to an NPR interview in which she pretended to deep-throat the microphone--the rocket ship was already on fire.”
― Carl Hiaasen, Star Island

“Congratulations. A new low.”
― Carl Hiaasen, Star Island

“Okay, I'll adopt a kid. That would be huge. No, three kids! Tell Maury to get all over it.'
'Honey, no,' Janet Bunterman said. She endeavored to squelch the idea without stating the obvious: that her daughter was unfit to care for a goldfish, much less a child.”
― Carl Hiaasen, Star Island

“Janet Bunterman had no reason to believe her husband, who for several years had been carrying on a relationship with a bisexual Danish couple who owned a consignment shop in Pasadena. Sometimes he accompanied them on long weekends to Ojai or Moab. Janet Bunterman tolerated Ned Bunterman's antics because he did a semi-competent job of managing their daughter's earnings, and because Janet herself was sweatily involved with her thirty year old tennis instructor.”
― Carl Hiaasen, Star Island

“His face appeared to have been massaged with an industrial cheese grater and then retouched with a glue gun.”
― Carl Hiaasen, Star Island

“It amazed him that people could be so tactless. Being a disfigured felon carried weight in certain social circles, though apparently not on South Beach.”
― Carl Hiaasen, Star Island