Boston Boy Quotes

“Remember, kid,” Frank said, “if you’ve got the goods on them, there’s nothing they can do to you. Except kill you.”
― Nat Hentoff, Boston Boy: Growing up with Jazz and Other Rebellious Passions

“Don’t say anything you can’t back up.” It was, of course, the most useful instruction in journalism I have ever been given.”
― Nat Hentoff, Boston Boy: Growing up with Jazz and Other Rebellious Passions

“All in all, nothing was broken, so nothing needed fixing. Dr. Meyerson ended by saying that I was an idealist, a condition that would lead me to certain unpleasant surprises but was otherwise not necessarily a debilitating trait.”
― Nat Hentoff, Boston Boy: Growing up with Jazz and Other Rebellious Passions

“It’s up to me,” George would say, “to point out who the bastards really are in this life.”
― Nat Hentoff, Boston Boy: Growing up with Jazz and Other Rebellious Passions

“Tell me, Mrs. Hentoff,” said our lawyer, “after he read the reference to him in Mr. Frazier’s column, what was your husband’s reaction?” “He was very upset,” Mrs. Hentoff answered. “He couldn’t sleep.” “Well, how long did this last?” asked our lawyer who had advised her that a year would be an effective answer. “Well, how long could it last?” the forthright Mrs. Hentoff answered. “Two nights. Three nights.” Much laughter in the courtroom, including the jury box and the bench.”
― Nat Hentoff, Boston Boy: Growing up with Jazz and Other Rebellious Passions

“Frazier went on to New York for some years, working for Life and then free-lancing. Wherever he was, one of Frazier’s abiding pleasures was his enemies list, and by the 1950s I was on it: my ear was tin, my politics were trendy, and my writing style was impenetrable (which was all to the common good, Frazier added).”
― Nat Hentoff, Boston Boy: Growing up with Jazz and Other Rebellious Passions

“George had two primary reasons for writing. First, like all writers, he wanted to call attention to himself. Second, he wanted to call attention to writers, performers, and a very few politicians who had duende. He once explained duende as “heightened panache” or “overpowering presence.” At another time he said that while duende is very difficult to define, “when it is there, it is unmistakable, inspiring our awe,” making “icy fingers run down our spine.” Lady Day, Lee Wiley, James Michael Curley had duende. “My God,” wrote Frazier, “how James Michael Curley had it! How he quickened our memory.”
― Nat Hentoff, Boston Boy: Growing up with Jazz and Other Rebellious Passions

“Jo told me where the music had come from, where he had come from, and how to listen. He leaned forward. “Now, when you hear a jazz musician up on that stand, he is telling you what happened to him this afternoon, the night before, what has happened to him during his whole life. This is serious business. And”—Jo shot me with a long finger—“there is no way a jazz musician, if he is a real jazz musician, can hide any of that, because we play ourselves, not Beethoven or whoever.”
― Nat Hentoff, Boston Boy: Growing up with Jazz and Other Rebellious Passions

“As N. Rubashov says to his diary in Darkness at Noon: “We concentrated all our efforts on preventing error and destroying the very seeds of it.”
― Nat Hentoff, Boston Boy: Growing up with Jazz and Other Rebellious Passions

“At that point, O’Connor wrote, “The figure on the bed stirred . . . Skeffington had raised himself slightly. His eyes were now wide open, and in them they saw the old challenging, mocking gleam. And they heard his voice, as taking charge now for the last time, he gave his answer: “‘The hell I would!’” Standing in the public car, O’Connor was still debating whether to go over and talk to the Governor when Curley motioned to the novelist to sit down beside him. “You know,” Curley said melodiously, “the part of your book I liked the best was when I was dying.”
― Nat Hentoff, Boston Boy: Growing up with Jazz and Other Rebellious Passions

“If the best man’s faults were written on his forehead, it would make him pull his hat over his eyes.”
― Nat Hentoff, Boston Boy: Growing up with Jazz and Other Rebellious Passions

“how each had betrayed the people and Jim Curley (same thing),”
― Nat Hentoff, Boston Boy: Growing up with Jazz and Other Rebellious Passions

“As for me, I decided that when you know exactly what someone is going to say in answer to every single question you ask, you ought to put your nickel in some other machine.”
― Nat Hentoff, Boston Boy: Growing up with Jazz and Other Rebellious Passions

“Politics, in any case, was of less compelling interest to me in those immediate post–bar mitzvah years than jazz, the Boston Red Sox, and the girls, mostly dark but a few golden, of our ghetto. That is, until Arthur Koestler’s Darkness at Noon. I read it the summer I was seventeen. That one book, about all the Stalins in all the centuries, immunized me from then on against any variant, anywhere in the world, of the credo that infects both executioners and victims in Darkness at Noon: “The only moral criterion we recognize is that of social utility.”
― Nat Hentoff, Boston Boy: Growing up with Jazz and Other Rebellious Passions

“Aparticularly vivid figure in The Last Hurrah is named Charlie Hennessy. While many readers recognized Frank Skeffington as James Michael Curley, only Boston readers of the novel were likely to know that Charlie Hennessy was actually Clem Norton, for many years an unsuccessful political opponent and bemused admirer of James Michael Curley.”
― Nat Hentoff, Boston Boy: Growing up with Jazz and Other Rebellious Passions

“Years later, at a bar, between sets of the volcanic Charles Mingus Jazz Workshop, I am telling a black nationalist and Mingus about Jewish blues, blues that are thousands of years old, blues with plenty of their own soul. Mingus is interested. He wants to hear some. But the other guy, he says blues are only one color, his. Mingus says words sure do get in the way of hearing.”
― Nat Hentoff, Boston Boy: Growing up with Jazz and Other Rebellious Passions

“Senator Henry Cabot Lodge had proclaimed, without fear of political reprisal, that these immigrants and their progeny were “inferior.”
― Nat Hentoff, Boston Boy: Growing up with Jazz and Other Rebellious Passions