The Burglar Who Counted the Spoons Quotes

“Martin Greer Galton had ceased troubling his fellow man in 1964, when a cerebral aneurysm achieved what most of his acquaintances and business associates would have dearly loved to have had a hand in.”
― Lawrence Block, The Burglar Who Counted the Spoons

“Rabson”
― Lawrence Block, The Burglar Who Counted the Spoons

“St. James the Greater, an axe for St. Matthew, a cup (the cup of sorrow) for St. John, and so on, all the way down to a bag of money for Judas Iscariot. St. Peter gets a sword or a key, or sometimes a fish. (St. James the Lesser gets a fuller’s bat on his spoon, but don’t ask me what a fuller’s bat looks like, or how James felt about being designated the lesser of two apostles.)”
― Lawrence Block, The Burglar Who Counted the Spoons

“Do you know of that curious subset of London Cockneys called the Pearlies? They favor clothing thoroughly”
― Lawrence Block, The Burglar Who Counted the Spoons

“Political campaign buttons you can sew on your clothes,” I said. “I never knew such things existed. Do you collect the other sort as well? With the pins?” “Pin-back buttons. Yes, of course, and they constitute the great bulk of my collection. I’m especially fond of third-party buttons. Debs is my favorite, Eugene Victor Debs. He was the standard bearer for the Socialist Party in four consecutive elections from 1900 through 1912. A man named Benson took over in 1916, but in 1920 Debs was back again. He was serving a prison term for opposing the war, and his campaign button reads ‘For President: Convict No. 9563.’ And just under a million voters chose him over Harding and Cox.”
― Lawrence Block, The Burglar Who Counted the Spoons

“It supports the 1884 Republican candidacy of James Blaine, who lost a very close election to Grover Cleveland. His supporters called him The Plumed Knight. The Cleveland crowd disagreed. ‘Blaine, Blaine, James G. Blaine,’ they chanted, ‘the highfalutin’ liar from the state of Maine.’ ” “Politics was so much kinder and gentler back then.”
― Lawrence Block, The Burglar Who Counted the Spoons

“Bippety Boppety Boo.”
― Lawrence Block, The Burglar Who Counted the Spoons

“would have been worth it. Remember what Thorstein Veblen wrote about conspicuous consumption?”
― Lawrence Block, The Burglar Who Counted the Spoons

“When a straight woman giggles at another woman it just means she thinks something’s funny. When she giggles at a man it means she likes him.”
― Lawrence Block, The Burglar Who Counted the Spoons

“After thirty-plus years as a latter-day robber baron and almost as many as a fiercely acquisitive retiree, the old man clapped both hands to his head, made a sound like a peevish crow, and collapsed to the floor. He landed in the middle of the immense Aubusson carpet in the Great Room of Galtonbrook Hall, the pile of marble that had been his home and would be his memorial. Galtonbrook Hall loomed less than half a mile from Columbia Presbyterian Hospital, and an ambulance got there in minutes, but they didn’t have to rush. Martin Greer Galton, born March 7, 1881, in Latrobe, Pennsylvania, was almost certainly dead by the time he hit the floor. Now, fifty years later, his house lived on. He’d devoted the first half of his life to making money and the second half to spending it, collecting art and artifacts in great profusion, and building Galtonbrook Hall to house himself for his lifetime and his treasures for all eternity. That at least was the plan, and he’d funded the enterprise sufficiently to see it carried out. What had been a home was now a museum, open to the public six days a week. Out-of-towners rarely found their way to the Galtonbrook; it didn’t get star treatment in the guidebooks, and it was miles from midtown, miles from the Upper East Side’s Museum Mile. As a result it was rarely crowded. You had to know about it and you had to have a reason to go there, and if you were in the neighborhood you’d probably wind up at the Cloisters instead. “We’ll go to the Galtonbrook the next time,” you’d tell yourself, but you wouldn’t. Neither Carolyn nor I had been there until our visit five days earlier, on a Thursday afternoon. We’d stood in front of a portrait of a man in a plumed hat, and its brass label identified it as the work of Rembrandt. The guidebook I’d consulted had its doubts, and repeated an old observation: Rembrandt painted two hundred portraits, of which three hundred are in Europe and four hundred in the United States of America. “So it’s a fake,” she said. “If it is,” I said, “we only know”
― Lawrence Block, The Burglar Who Counted the Spoons

“I try to avoid eating endangered species, let alone mythical ones. You”
― Lawrence Block, The Burglar Who Counted the Spoons

“I heard the pitter patter of little old feet.”
― Lawrence Block, The Burglar Who Counted the Spoons