Whores for Gloria Quotes

“Her breasts were big and sad like owls' eyes.”
― William T. Vollmann, Whores for Gloria

“Code Six and Jimmy were not and never had been cadets immaculate in long white sweeps of uniform; they were the troops silhouetted black against the blue sea, the troops leaping down from the landing craft into the hot sea, running toward the beach, the soldiers running through a burned-out place where pale faces prayed over the dead bodies that kept coming back inside plastic bags inside caskets inside flags in a truck with everyone saluting.”
― William T. Vollmann, Whores for Gloria

“None of you stink as much as me! he shouted proudly. You can shit your pants all day and you still wouldn't bear a candle to me! Haw!”
― William T. Vollmann, Whores for Gloria

“When everything-EVERYTHING about life makes you want to grin, and it just gets sunnier and funnier until after a while you can only see the teeth in the smiles and then you feel... —well, not "on the edge" exactly, for the world has no edge; but as if you have always been over the edge, and the smiling and laughing is a sort of spastic reflex like crying or retching (really, it's all the same);— when you drink red wine in a cup and try to categorize the geometry of the gleam-patterns you see on the liquid's surface-and you may find, my friends, that you can almost do it: you agree with yourself upon the existence of a light-shape like the outline of a hemisphere drawn in concave at the equator; but another sip and it changes to a gleam-ring all around the rim of the wine circle; and another and it is reddish-black everywhere with the unsteady image of your face in it, your skin redder and your mouth blacker than the wine, and another and you see white specks swimming in the cup: they are not reflections at all, but bits of grease or rice or cereal, or maybe cheek-cells that got washed out of your mouth (the age-old question: is the imper-fection, the filth, in you or in the glass?); —but then your attention is diverted forever by the ugly purple stain around the edge of the cup where your lips have been; when everything is so confusing that you can never be sure whether or not your whore is a woman until she pulls her underpants down; when nothing is clear, and whore-chasing is a merry-go-round of death (if you don't catch a disease that will kill you, why, you will go around again, not because you want to die but because until you do everything remains unclear); when you get drunken crushes on women whose drunken mothers used to try to stab them; when the names of streets are like Nabokov's wearisome clever-ness; when only the pretty shapes of women have integrity and when you close your eyes still see them leaning and crossing their legs and milking their tits at you, THEN you may on occasion like Jimmy find yourself looking down a long black block, down the tunnels of infinity to a streedamp, a corner and a woman's waiting silhouette. —Or else like Jimmy you may have another drink”
― William T. Vollmann, Whores for Gloria

“Profile of the Tenderloin Street Prostitute (1985-1988):
...
Point #20 (of 23) - She remembers a happy childhood.”
― William T. Vollmann, Whores for Gloria

“Trick names often fall into one of three categories: (1) words associated with pleasure (Joy, Felicia, etc.) (2) words associated with luxurious things than the John can eat or drink up (Candy, Brandi, etc.) (3) names that sound "aristocratic" or "fancy" (Stella, Melissa, etc.).”
― William T. Vollmann, Whores for Gloria

“Past an empty stretch of white wall with stone flowers inset below windows, he spied a pair of pop-eyed pimp-eyes as urgent as whore-eyes but roundly comical as the pimp twisted himself from side to side not to be sexy but to be urgent as if to say Jimmy this is your one and only chance to get the woman whose cunt will satisfy you for ever and ever, in sickness and in health, so help me God, but you have to come with me right now down this dark dark alley past the sign that says MOVIES and left by the trash cans following the luminescence of my white straw hat and white jeans and the whites of my eyes which I will continually turn back upon you to make sure that you stay with me all the way to the barred basement windows where your good fortune waits for you already saying oh Jimmy Jimmy but as soon as the man opened his mouth he became as monotonous as the intricacies of brick walls and the steel lattice-windows of bars, and Jimmy walked away.”
― William T. Vollmann, Whores for Gloria

“A lot of the men she sucked off never knew she wasn't a woman. Some of them told her she gave the best blow jobs they'd ever had. One time when she went to jail someone who knew said she was a Transformer and they all said no fucking way; she ain't no Transformer; and when she was proven guilty of possession of a penis they said wow; they said that one ain't no Transformer—that one's a Decepticon!”
― William T. Vollmann, Whores for Gloria

“OK he said all those whores out there are for me but they also each have something to give to Gloria if I can just find out what that is and help Gloria along like a splash of light on the ocean and everything moving and rocking and shining in the sun so God help me now because Gloria is the great sea those whore-fish swim in; God help me to give up food so I can spend more of my SSI checks on whores and find what I need to find and God let Gloria grow right with me because I sure don't want to die alone.”
― William T. Vollmann, Whores for Gloria

“The first thing she asked to do was use the bathroom. He heard her shit. I suppose she must be nervous, he said to himself. Jimmy had once been a reader, so he knew how in Auschwitz or Treblinka there was a ramp leading up to the gas chambers called the Road to Heaven where all the women had to wait naked and squatting while the men were finished being gassed (they went first because they did not need to have their hair cut off for the submarine crews), and “while the sheared women waited they usually emptied their bowels and the guards laughed and laughed like hooded pimps in an alley and now history repeated itself as Jimmy stood nipping on a fresh beer and waiting for Nicole to complete the preparations for her little ordeal.”
― William T. Vollmann, Whores for Gloria

“Jimmy decided to get drunk—not just drunk enough to enjoy life (here he grinned, and Cecily smiled back), not just drunk enough to fuck Cecily for instance up the ass without a rubber, not just drunk enough to hear bees buzzing round his ears and wake up in another bad place he'd never seen before with crushed bugs on the walls and men maybe standing over him looking down at him with their teeth drawn away from their lips, and puke cold and sticky all over his face again, puke being the concretization of Jimmy's disgust with Jimmy whose eyes would be burning and throat burning and stomach squirming like a guilty squid and every muscle aching, and the dry heaves inside him just like heartbeats, just like yesterday;—no, he wanted to be drunk enough to scientifically establish the existence of the whores that he could see all around him. (Jimmy had always liked whores.) So he started drinking.”
― William T. Vollmann, Whores for Gloria

“(sunglasses make the world quieter and safer, as if you are viewing things behind smoked windows fronting your skull-house: you are inside and the world is outside, and the world cannot see into you; mirror sunglasses double the armor),”
― William T. Vollmann, Whores for Gloria

“For we all must build our worlds around us, bravely or dreamily, as long as we can we shelter ourselves from the rain, walling ourselves in gorgeously.”
― William T. Vollmann, Whores for Gloria