Home Land Quotes

“I knew I was in the vicinity of a serious lesson, if not about how to live life, then at least how to put some poetry into your craven retreat from it.”
― Sam Lipsyte, Home Land

“It was a big room with a shag carpet, antique lamps, a cabinet TV from days when entertainment lurked in the guise of furniture”
― Sam Lipsyte, Home Land: A Novel

“Kids must coddle their excitements. Soon enough the normies have you surrounded. It’s all barricades, bullhorns. Come out, come out with your wonder abated.”
― Sam Lipsyte, Home Land: A Novel

“Their pure hate was tainted now. We pine for avengers. We get bigots, thugs.”
― Sam Lipsyte, Home Land: A Novel

“God, I worried for you, Stacy, which I’m certain I mentioned a few weeks later when I asked you to the Halloween Dance. You replied that though you volunteered after school to work with the demented, you made it your policy not to date them.”
― Sam Lipsyte, Home Land: A Novel

“Gwendolyn always said I expected too much from the world. “You wake up every morning like you should get a parade.”
― Sam Lipsyte, Home Land: A Novel

“How's bathing at knifepoint in the phlegm of the dead?”
― Sam Lipsyte, Home Land

“You’re going to jail,” said an old lady. “You can’t leave your baby out here. This is America. We could have killed it.”
― Sam Lipsyte, Home Land: A Novel

“Some nights,” I said, “I picture myself naked, covered in napalm, running down the street. But then it’s not napalm. It’s apple butter. And it’s not a street. It’s my mother.”
― Sam Lipsyte, Home Land: A Novel

“I’m quite happy in my unhappy way. I’m more than satisfied to remain unsatisfied”
― Sam Lipsyte, Home Land: A Novel

“It was a fucking suggestion. Do you think my world turns on your happiness? Your success? Do what you please. Just make sure you're alive to wipe my ass when I'm an invalid."... the way I told it to Gary later, it was a kind of liberation. Go forth, Daddy Miner was saying, be your own disappointment. There's a whole wide world to fail in.”
― Sam Lipsyte, Home Land

“Is this what Principal Fontana meant by the phrase 'well-rounded'?

It’s fucking spherical, Catamounts.”
― Sam Lipsyte, Home Land