Gold Coast Quotes

“What these people were trying to create or re-create here in this new world is beyond me. I can't put myself in their minds or their hearts, but I can sympathize with their struggle for an identity, with their puzzlement, which has troubled Americans from the very beginning - Who are we, where do we fit in, where are we going?”
― Nelson DeMille, Gold Coast

“But if I could choose how and when I wanted to die, I would want to be an eighty-year-old man shot by a jealous young husband who had caught me in bed with his teenage wife.”
― Nelson DeMille, The Gold Coast

“There is no harder worker than a former government employee who has discovered the word incentive.”
― Nelson DeMille, The Gold Coast

“An Englishman once said that he found it easier to be a member of a club than of the human race because the bylaws were shorter, and he knew all the members personally. That sounds about right.”
― Nelson DeMille, The Gold Coast

“In America if you’re poor, you’re worse than a criminal. You’re nobody.”
― Nelson DeMille, The Gold Coast

“I wasn't sure about that, but one never knows. Sometimes a neighborhood, like a culture or civilization, is strong enough to absorb and acculturate any number of newcomers. But I don't know if that's true around here any longer. The outward forms and appearances look the same - [...]- but the substance has been altered.”
― Nelson DeMille, Gold Coast

“No, you’re not getting it. You see… never mind. Listen, I want you to get a headache at nine-forty-five.” “You’re giving me a headache now.” She added, “And why do I always have to get a headache? People are beginning to think I have a terminal disease. Why don’t you say your hemorrhoids are acting up at nine-forty-five?”
― Nelson DeMille, The Gold Coast

“But that's all hindsight. That evening, my mind was cloudy, and my good judgment was influenced by my need to prove something. It goes to show you, you shouldn't stay out too late during the week.”
― Nelson DeMille, Gold Coast

“Indeed we all try to raise our children as if our past experiences are important for their future, but they rarely are.”
― Nelson DeMille, The Gold Coast

“Well, no one ever said the truth would make you happy—only free.”
― Nelson DeMille, The Gold Coast

“A boat is sort of a litmus test for relationships, the close quarters and solitude compelling people into either a warm bond or into mutiny and murder. As”
― Nelson DeMille, The Gold Coast

“I honestly don’t know how anyone functions in this society without a law degree.”
― Nelson DeMille, The Gold Coast

“We can be captains of our fate, I thought, but not masters of it. Or as an old sailing instructor told me when I was a boy, “God sends you the weather, kid. What you do with it or what it does to you depends on how good a sailor you are.” That about summed it up.”
― Nelson DeMille, The Gold Coast

“I don’t mean to sound racist, but I am curious as to why wealthy foreigners want to buy our houses, wear our clothes, and emulate our manners. I suppose I should be flattered, and I suppose I am. I mean, I never had a desire to sit in a tent and eat camel meat with my fingers.”
― Nelson DeMille, The Gold Coast

“year. Actually, I notice that when Susan drives to and from church I feel closer to God than I do inside the church.”
― Nelson DeMille, The Gold Coast

“Tolkien said, ‘It doesn’t do to leave a live dragon out of your calculations if you live near him.”
― Nelson DeMille, The Gold Coast

“had to tell Jimmy to lighten up”
― Nelson DeMille, The Gold Coast

“He shrugged. “I don’t know. Maybe 1900.” I nodded. A real slick entrepreneur would have made the most of that: Giulio’s; family-owned on Mott Street since 1899. (The last century always sounds better.)”
― Nelson DeMille, The Gold Coast

“Depression, the war, and the ninety-percent tax rates of the forties and fifties, there was less and less of this paper, and it finally vanished as mysteriously as it had first appeared.”
― Nelson DeMille, The Gold Coast

“Also, after the Crash of ’29, this building chalked up six jumpers,”
― Nelson DeMille, The Gold Coast

“The problem with a church, any church, I think, is that unlike a country club, anyone can join. The result of this open-door policy is that for one hour a week, all the social classes must humble themselves before God and do it under the same roof in full view of one another. I’m not suggesting private churches or first-class pews up front like they used to have, and I don’t think dimming the lights would help much. But I know that years ago, it was understood that one sort of people went to the early service, and the other sort of people to the later one.”
― Nelson DeMille, The Gold Coast

“This place has a three-hundred-year history of secret protocols, ancient grievances, and a stifling class structure. The Gold Coast makes New England look informal and friendly.”
― Nelson DeMille, The Gold Coast

“Thoreau’s philosophy: If you read about one train wreck, you’ve read about them all.”
― Nelson DeMille, The Gold Coast

“One can be a product only of one’s own era, not anyone else’s.”
― Nelson DeMille, The Gold Coast

“I regarded Novac a moment. He had on an awful gray poplin cotton suit, the sort of thing that prisons issue when they set you free. He wore shoes that actually had gum soles, and the uppers were made of a miracle synthetic that could be safely cleaned with Brillo. His shirt, his tie, socks, watch, even his haircut, were all bargain basement, and I found myself irrationally offended by the man because of the air of sensible frugality about him. Actually, I hate a man who won’t splurge on a good suit.”
― Nelson DeMille, The Gold Coast

“When you cheat at poker, life, or taxes, you’ve taken the honor and fun out of winning, and ultimately you’ve cheated yourself out of the finest pleasure in life: beating the other guy fair and square. That’s what I was taught in school.”
― Nelson DeMille, The Gold Coast

“In our pursuit of fidelity within a twenty-year-old marriage, Susan and I, in addition to the historical romances, sometimes talk about a premarital lover as part of our foreplay. I read in a book once that it was all right to do this, to get the juices going, but afterward, as you’re both lying there, one partner is usually sullen and the other is sorry he or she was so graphic. Well, if you play with fire to get heat, you can also get burned.”
― Nelson DeMille, The Gold Coast

“We entered the house, and there was that pregnant silence in the air, the silence between a husband and wife who have just had words, and it is unlike any other silence except perhaps the awful stillness you hear between the flash of an atomic bomb and the blast.”
― Nelson DeMille, The Gold Coast

“Oddly enough, I didn’t recall feeling that way the week before. I wasn’t certain how this revelation came about, but revelations are like that; they just smack you across the face one day, and you know you’ve arrived at the truth without even knowing you were looking for it. What you do about it is another matter. I”
― Nelson DeMille, The Gold Coast

“there are brief enchanted moments in history and in the short lives of men and women, there is wonder and there is cynicism, there are dreams that can come true, and dreams that can’t. And there was a time, you know, not so long ago, as recently as my own childhood in fact, when everyone believed in the future and eagerly awaited it or rushed to meet it. But now nearly everyone I know or used to know is trying to slow the speed of the world as the future starts to look more and more like someplace you don’t want to be.”
― Nelson DeMille, The Gold Coast