Wittgenstein's Lolita and The Iceman Quotes

“Through a deep blue dusk that fell at the very end of a season of ruin he came up past the landscape of ruin itself. Looming palely out of a coming dark were statuary, birdbaths, Madonnas, unarmed Venuses, capering cherubim, shapeless shapes past all identifying. The yard as it climbed toward the yellowlit house at its summit looked like a dumping ground for sculptors, the repository for misbegotten art that resulted from clumsy hands, hangovers, dementia praecox. A yard sale from the attic of a madhouse.”
― William Gay, Wittgenstein's Lolita and The Iceman

“He thought how much simpler everything would be without the baggage you accumulate going through life. All the dog carcasses and dead wives and tiny houses that come back to haunt you. If you could just deepsix it all over the side and keep moving. If you could just slide through customs with nothing to declare.”
― William Gay, Wittgenstein's Lolita and The Iceman

“He fought the police until they overpowered him, they had to shoot him with one of those stun guns. Daddy shipped her body back to Illinois and had it buried there. But that’s not the point. Do you see the point? For the life of him Rideout didn’t. He didn’t say anything. He didn’t believe there was a point. The point is that’s what I want, she said. Somebody who loves you so much they just won’t ever quit on you. Absolutely no ambivalence. That will say fuck the grave and refuse to let you go and if you do they reach into the dark after you and pull you back into the light. That’s what I want.”
― William Gay, Wittgenstein's Lolita and The Iceman

“In these foreshortened December days dusk came early. Night came rolling out of the violet trees like dark waters from a levee breached and unseen and swept across the field toward them. His thumb traced the fading cerise and mauve outline of her bruises. The side of her face, the ribcage below her left breast. All the light there was in her bedroom was a candle she’d lit and in its glow the bruises had taken on the shapes of conjectural countries, old lost continents you shouldn’t ever go to. She rose naked from the bed and took up their wine glasses from the nightstand. With the dim light behind her and her red hair unbraided all down her back she looked like a fairytale princess a few years past happily ever after who’d rethought her position and gone over to the dark side.”
― William Gay, Wittgenstein's Lolita and The Iceman