A Man in Full Quotes

“One of the few freedoms that we have as human beings that cannot be taken away from us is the freedom to assent to what is true and to deny what is false. Nothing you can give me is worth surrendering that freedom for. At this moment I'm a man with complete tranquillity...I've been a real estate developer for most of my life, and I can tell you that a developer lives with the opposite of tranquillity, which is perturbation. You're perturbed about something all the time. You build your first development, and right away you want to build a bigger one, and you want a bigger house to live in, and if it ain't in Buckhead, you might as well cut your wrists. Soon's you got that, you want a plantation, tens of thousands of acres devoted solely to shooting quail, because you know of four or five developers who've already got that. And soon's you get that, you want a place on Sea Island and a Hatteras cruiser and a spread northwest of Buckhead, near the Chattahoochee, where you can ride a horse during the week, when you're not down at the plantation, plus a ranch in Wyoming, Colorado, or Montana, because truly successful men in Atlanta and New York all got their ranches, and of course now you need a private plane, a big one, too, a jet, a Gulfstream Five, because who's got the patience and the time and the humility to fly commercially, even to the plantation, much less out to a ranch? What is it you're looking for in this endless quest? Tranquillity. You think if only you can acquire enough worldly goods, enough recognition, enough eminence, you will be free, there'll be nothing more to worry about, and instead you become a bigger and bigger slave to how you think others are judging you.”
― Tom Wolfe, A Man in Full

“He Who Would Live Forever had done an instantaneous back-of-the-envelope calculation and decided that the vicinity of the Chevrolet Suburban was a better strategic alternative than anyplace anywhere near that whitish sandy road above which a gigantic terror-chattering rattlesnake now thrashed in the grip of his boss gone berserk.”
― Tom Wolfe, A Man in Full

“You do what you have to do, and I will do what I have to do, which is live and die like a man.”
― Tom Wolfe, A Man in Full

“Then he put that one down behind a framed sepia-tone picture of a baseball player named Cecil Travis and picked up another one and tilted it back to his lips.”
― Tom Wolfe, A Man in Full

“Well,” said the boy, “most philosophies assume that you’re free, you’ve got all these possibilities, and it’s like you can design your own life any way you want.” The boy hesitated; so Charlie gave him a little encouragement. “Go ahead.” “The Stoics, they assumed the opposite. They said that in fact you have very few choices. You’re probably trapped in some situation, everything from being under somebody’s thumb to being a slave to disease to actually being in jail. They assumed that in all likelihood you weren’t free.”
― Tom Wolfe, A Man in Full

“the unmistakable terminus—of a process that presses in upon us all. The torture begins soon after the moment of birth, but we choose to call it ‘education,’ ‘religion,’ ‘government,’ ‘custom,’ ‘convention,’ ‘tradition,’ and ‘Western civilization.’ The result is”— Am I hearing what I think I’m hearing or am I crazy? thought Charlie. Why wasn’t somebody at one of these many tables hissing?—or something— —“a relentless confinement within ‘the norm,’ ‘the standard,’ a process so”—”
― Tom Wolfe, A Man in Full

“What was Martha Croker, née Martha Starling, from Richmond, Virginia, from the very best part of Richmond, Cary Street Road, daughter of the former president of the Commonwealth Club—what was she doing here in an exercise hive in Buckhead in Atlanta, listening to a lot of mindless, obscene, totally vulgar “Negro music,” as her father had always called it, letting herself be jostled, jabbed, and belittled by a bunch of vain, brainless, narcissistic, body-snobbish girls, dutifully obeying a bald-headed martinet from Turkey named Mustafa Gunt who liked to send her running up a set of fire stairs to within a c.c. or so of her cardiac capacity? She was past menopause.”
― Tom Wolfe, A Man in Full

“Martha nodded to indicate she was not dying. She tried to shrink. If her rectangle had had a drain in it, she would have gladly swirled down it and disappeared.”
― Tom Wolfe, A Man in Full

“Every real leader knew that the occasional outburst of unexplained anger was good...”
― Tom Wolfe, A Man in Full

“It was the real loose-sausage-eating, brown-liquor-drinking Southern face of a white athlete turned forty and covered with a smooth well-fed layer of flesh. His neck, which seemed a foot wide, rose up out of a yellow polo shirt and a blue blazer as if it were unit-welded to his trapezius muscles and his shoulders. He was like a single solid slab of meat clear up to his hair, which was a head of hair and a half, a strange silvery blond color, coiffed with bouncy fullness and little flips that screamed $65 male hairdo. Not a single cilium was out of place. Amid the vast smooth meat of his head and neck, his eyes and his mouth seemed terribly tiny, but they were both going all out to register pleasure at the sight of Counselor Roger White, this black man who had arrived at the door at 7:42 on Freaknic Saturday night.”
― Tom Wolfe, A Man in Full

“And besides, every true leader of men knew that when challenged by an underling, you don't stop to explain. You squash that underling and explain later, if you have to”
― Tom Wolfe, A Man in Full

“The depressed man longs for heavy clouds, fog, mist, chilly weather, downpours, hail.”
― Tom Wolfe, A Man in Full

“Nietzsche once said that resentment is the least explored of the primary human motivations. He said there are certain types of people who can’t improve their own place in the world, and so they devote all their energies to tearing down others. He called them ‘the tarantulas.”
― Tom Wolfe, A Man in Full

“They said, ‘We must behead you then.’ “‘So be it,’ I said. ‘Behead me, if it is better for you that way. When did I tell you that I was immortal? You will do your part, and I mine. It is yours to kill, mine to die without quailing: yours to banish, mine to go into exile without groaning.’” He was sent into exile.”
― Tom Wolfe, A Man in Full

“Zeus says, ‘If it were possible I would have made your body and your possessions (those trifles that you prize) free and untrammelled. But as things are—never forget this—this body is not yours, it is but a clever mixture of clay. I gave you a portion of our divinity, a spark from our own fire, the power to act and not to act, the will to get and the will to avoid. If you pay heed to this, you will not groan, you will blame no man, you will flatter none.”
― Tom Wolfe, A Man in Full

“The depressed man realizes that all daily routines imply a belief in Tomorrow and are cruel jokes since of course tomorrow no longer exists.”
― Tom Wolfe, A Man in Full

“The nerve of Serena . . . and then he realized he had broken one of his own cardinal rules, which was: In dealing with subordinates and women, never justify, never explain, never back off”
― Tom Wolfe, A Man in Full

“It was so taboo even to intimate that you could be aroused by male physical power that she had never said a word about it to anyone, least of all Nancy King.”
― Tom Wolfe, A Man in Full

“I’m curious about why all these black athletes have such a thing for white women.”
― Tom Wolfe, A Man in Full

“It was the sort of look people get when they are about to consider what insignificant specks they are in the immense and incomprehensible scheme of things, if, indeed, there is any scheme at all. You”
― Tom Wolfe, A Man in Full

“By the time she chugged all the way up the five flights and back down to the room and her rectangle, she was drenched with sweat and breathing with loud, rapid heaves. Gradually she became aware of … eyes”
― Tom Wolfe, A Man in Full

“Adorning his neck was a gold chain so chunky you could have used it to pull an Isuzu pickup out of a red clay ditch.”
― Tom Wolfe, A Man in Full

“The room was not especially large, but the stylishness of it struck Peepgass”
― Tom Wolfe, A Man in Full