The Crazyladies of Pearl Street Quotes

“Of course these gifts were reckless extravagances for a family that was never more than a couple of dollars and a few days away from hunger, but that’s how poor people cope with being marooned in poverty while all around them flows the frothy stream of the consumer culture.”
― Trevanian, The Crazyladies of Pearl Street

“my job to color the margarine, putting the white, lard-like block into a bowl then sprinkling orange coloring powder over it and mixing with a fork until it was more brazenly yellow than any butter would dare to be.”
― Trevanian, The Crazyladies of Pearl Street

“The Trevanian Buff is a strange and wonderful creature: an outsider, a natural elitist, not so much a cynic as an idealist mugged by reality, not just one of those who march to a different drummer, but the solo drummer in a parade of one.”
― Trevanian, The Crazyladies of Pearl Street

“Prudence is a bourgeois virtue, because the rich have something worth saving. The poor splurge because they need desperately to make a colorful splash across the drab fabric of their lives. The hungry don’t dream of brown rice and vegetables; they dream of cake.”
― Trevanian, The Crazyladies of Pearl Street

“She often said, and honestly believed, that she was not prejudiced—well, except in the case of Italian mobsters and drunken Irish loafers and stupid Poles and snooty Yankee Protestants, but then who wasn’t?”
― Trevanian, The Crazyladies of Pearl Street

“and it was a given of the Western genre, both on the radio and in the movies (it’s interesting that one was ‘on’ the radio but ‘in’ the movies)”
― Trevanian, The Crazyladies of Pearl Street

“the first batch of ads just after the couple broke up, and the second just before they got together again...two moments that the sponsors considered so suspenseful that the listener wouldn’t be able to step away from the radio for fear of missing the resolution.”
― Trevanian, The Crazyladies of Pearl Street

“When I hear middle-class people complain about the poor buying luxuries for their kids when they don’t even have enough for groceries, I remember the lavish Christmases my mother gave us, even at the risk of breaking up the family. Prudence is a bourgeois virtue, because the rich have something worth saving. The poor splurge because they need desperately to make a colorful splash across the drab fabric of their lives. The hungry don’t dream of brown rice and vegetables; they dream of cake.”
― Trevanian, The Crazyladies of Pearl Street

“The effect of this was to make me abjure hackneyed expressions from an early age, so I suppose I benefited from my mother’s phrasal insouciance in the long run, although it’s possible that my automatic eschewal of clichés occasionally drove me from the Scylla of ridicule into the turbid Charybdisian eddies of sesquipedalian obfuscation...though I trust not.”
― Trevanian, The Crazyladies of Pearl Street

“Mother used to shape and score the Spam, arrange the rings of pineapple, then pour a little maple syrup over it and bake it so that it came out looking almost exactly like a miniature glazed ham, and we used to have it with yams on which we melted margarine.”
― Trevanian, The Crazyladies of Pearl Street

“They say that life is the great teacher, but that’s crap. No really good teacher would give you the test before she’d taught the lesson.”
― Trevanian, The Crazyladies of Pearl Street

“I fell asleep that night with the conviction that love was not only blind but stupid as well.”
― Trevanian, The Crazyladies of Pearl Street

“Take Time, for instance. I envisioned ‘Now’ as a bright instant of time racing forward from the Future into the Past, but the Past never grew longer by accumulating the constant flow of moments Now deposited into it, nor did the Future get any shorter for all the bits of Now that Time tore from it, because both Past and Future were infinite, and one cannot imagine infinity plus a bit, or minus a bit. Even that fleeting spark of Now is elusive, because as you pronounced the N, the W is still in the Future, and when you get to the W, the N is already in the Past, never to be seen again.22”
― Trevanian, The Crazyladies of Pearl Street

“And yet, on those nights when the black butterflies of remorse flutter through a sleepless nuit blanche, I still sometimes hear that broken-off summons, those two clicks followed by a recriminating silence; and my throat tightens with shame as I remember the lonely old woman who I didn’t have time for because I was too busy trying to save myself.”
― Trevanian, The Crazyladies of Pearl Street

“was rage at the injustices that are a necessary effect of capitalism, because wealth is meaningless without relative poverty. What joy is there in being rich if you have to empty your own garbage cans, wash your own floors, pick your own vegetables, mow your own lawns, die in your own wars? There must be poor people against which the rich can measure their success.”
― Trevanian, The Crazyladies of Pearl Street

“But our lives are continuous and interwoven, and narrative fabric doesn’t tear neatly; there are threads to tie off, curiosities to satisfy.”
― Trevanian, The Crazyladies of Pearl Street

“I guess it’s true that you can’t go home again. Each moment has its place in the flow of time, then the moment passes, and if you reach back for it, you come up with a handful of dust.”
― Trevanian, The Crazyladies of Pearl Street

“Each moment has its place in the flow of time, then the moment passes, and if you reach back for it, you come up with a handful of dust.”
― Trevanian, The Crazyladies of Pearl Street

“there is no genetic basis for the ‘natural balance’ they claim to be born with, but their confidence gives them the ability to work high iron in wind and rain, protected from those lethal panic attacks that make the palms of lesser men sweat and their knees tremble. Mohawks have no vertigo because they believe they have no vertigo, just as I dare to face a pile of blank paper every day because I believe that I share the Onondagan aptitude for story-telling. This is one of those things that are dangerous to think about too long because if confidence sires ability out of daring, then what happens if a little crack appears in that confidence and doubt begins to seep through and spread and widen until you lose the belief that you can...whoa, there! Leave it alone. Don’t pick at thoughts like that. They infect.”
― Trevanian, The Crazyladies of Pearl Street

“body space was so tight that Nature had to double up on functions, why didn’t She have us smell with our fingertips or hear with our elbows—anything to save some special part of the body for the performance of this sublime act? (Perhaps the belly button, which seemed to have no very urgent function assigned to it.) Something wasn’t right here. Either my mother was wrong about the loftiness of love-making, or Nature was playing a cruel joke.”
― Trevanian, The Crazyladies of Pearl Street

“basso ostinado”
― Trevanian, The Crazyladies of Pearl Street

“intentioned myth.”
― Trevanian, The Crazyladies of Pearl Street