Again to Carthage Quotes

“It would always be the best of times, he thought. That’s what we are condemned to know. And it’s not just the youth. Everybody gets that. It’s youth blazing along on some kind of spectacularly high octane. It’s like having a benign fever all the time. It’s like being in love.”
― John L. Parker Jr., Again to Carthage

“I really thought that sooner or later if I kept looking I would figure out where the grown-ups were.”
― John L. Parker Jr., Again to Carthage

“We don’t do those kinds of things because we’re just so sure that there’ll always be time later.”
― John L. Parker Jr., Again to Carthage

“The marathon is a race of attrition.’ You’ve got to understand that. You’ve got to come to grips with that, Quenton. No one really wins a marathon. You just survive it better.”
― John L. Parker Jr., Again to Carthage

“He said: “If you want to train really well, you have to be a little bored.” “What on earth do you mean?” Cassidy said. “Just that if you really want to be focused on training, those two runs every day need to be the most interesting things going on in your life.”
― John L. Parker Jr., Again to Carthage

“No matter how cool you think your generation is, fifty years from now when they show pictures of you all dancing, you’re going to look just as ridiculous as those guys doing the Charleston.”
― John L. Parker Jr., Again to Carthage

“What I mean is that someone sees a race, and they think that’s what you do. They sort of know you had to train, but they weren’t watching then, so they don’t understand how incredibly much of it there is. But to us, it’s almost the whole thing. Racing is just this little tiny ritual we go through after everything else has been done. It’s a hood ornament.”
― John L. Parker Jr., Again to Carthage

“When I was a runner it was something we lived every second of our lives. It was such a part of us that if we had ever given it any thought, it would have been a mental lapse, a sign of weakness. Of course I am getting better every day, I would have said, what the hell am I training for otherwise? As if there were only one alternative, as if the arrow of improvement necessarily parallels the arrow of time, and in only one direction.”
― John L. Parker Jr., Again to Carthage

“it is actually possible to be living for years in a state of constant betterment.”
― John L. Parker Jr., Again to Carthage

“But when he reached the door, he heard his name. “Yes, sir?” “Remember one thing, Quenton.” “Yes, sir?” “No matter how cool you think your generation is, fifty years from now when they show pictures of you all dancing, you’re going to look just as ridiculous as those guys doing the Charleston.”
― John L. Parker Jr., Again to Carthage

“One day your parents are laughing twentysomethings aiming a garden hose at this skinny turbocharged brown buzz-cut ninny hopping around a plastic wading pool. Then all that exists only in jerky black-and-white eight-millimeter reels and faded prints and maybe it never happened at all.”
― John L. Parker Jr., Again to Carthage

“Cassidy could see through half-closed eyes the unadorned western horizon and in a quirky mind trick he could sense the entire fifty-mile stretch of deep purple Gulf Stream between the tiny wave-skipping boat and the limestone-and-coral Florida peninsula. He could sense as well the huge pelagic fish that moved through the stream deep and shallow and also all the manatees and sunfish and whales as well as all the German submarines and wooden sailing ships and blockade-runners that had plied it in years and centuries past, some bringing Tories, slaves, bricks; others taking guns, drugs, rum; and some dealing death and leaving burning American boys in oily life jackets within sight of straw-boatered dandies strolling the boardwalks at Daytona. In his presleep state he had the sensation of being able to grasp it all at once, as if in a four-dimensional painting encompassing both time and space, his own place in it an inconsequential squiggle of comings and goings.”
― John L. Parker Jr., Again to Carthage

“He had the usual sense of déjà vu in the moment when all the topside sounds muted away to the background and almost all auditory input imploded into the bubbly roar of his own exaggerated breathing.”
― John L. Parker Jr., Again to Carthage

“And as short as two miles had come to seem to him over the course of his running career, it occurred to him now that two miles was an insurmountable distance to an infant, or a legless man, or a human cadaver for that matter. Einstein was right, he decided. It is all relative.”
― John L. Parker Jr., Again to Carthage

“There might have been alcoholics in the group, Cassidy knew, but most of them were too young to know it yet. Cassidy didn't think he was one, but he wasn't sure. He was certainly capable of overdoing things, and not just booze. He figured it was that thing–that thing about going too far–that maybe made him a good runner and a good diver and sometimes a hair brained poet. It made his life exhilarating and sometimes ridiculous at the same time.”
― John L. Parker Jr., Again to Carthage

“girl in school, she was hot as a two-dollar”
― John L. Parker Jr., Again to Carthage