The World's Largest Man Quotes

“The South is a strange place, one that can't be fit inside a movie, a place that dares you to simplify it, like a prime number, like a Bible story, like my father.”
― Harrison Scott Key, The World's Largest Man

“I firmly believe that all human families are full of crazy people, and if your family doesn’t appear to have any, then there’s a high probability you lack situational awareness. I’ve”
― Harrison Scott Key, The World's Largest Man: A Memoir

“In one terrible instant, that terrible thing happened, the single most tragic experience of my, and just about any, childhood: boredom.”
― Harrison Scott Key, The World's Largest Man

“The South is a strange place, one that can’t be fit inside a movie, a place that dares you to simplify it, like a prime number, like a Bible story, like my father.”
― Harrison Scott Key, The World's Largest Man: A Memoir

“His greatest lesson was the one he never said out loud, the thing a father should do, which is this: Be there. Always be there. And never stop being there, until you can’t be there anymore. “Hey,”
― Harrison Scott Key, The World's Largest Man: A Memoir

“My wife was a riddle. I think all women are. Men are not riddles, even the smart ones. We are independent clauses, such as: “I like meat.” “Water feel good.”
― Harrison Scott Key, The World's Largest Man: A Memoir

“But now, I don't feel silly. I just feel a rush of something up through my heart, wide and deep as a river of light, and it rushes over the banks, and up through the throat and into the mouth and out my eyes, a great big surge of something that for so long had no name, a fugitive animal in a wood, and I know the name of it now, and what it is, is love.”
― Harrison Scott Key, The World's Largest Man

“the master bedrooms of married people always made me uneasy. I was afraid I’d see things that cannot be unseen, such as tubs of Vaseline or some sort of agricultural harness.”
― Harrison Scott Key, The World's Largest Man: A Memoir

“Pop was a devoted father, a large and powerful man who showered us with guns and love. He did not drink, or hit our mother; his only luxury the occasional heart attack.”
― Harrison Scott Key, The World's Largest Man: A Memoir

“But books were full of stories and stories were full of lies and lies hurt Jesus's feelings, so I didn't know what to think. I blamed my family. They were the ones who taught me so much about telling stories, and how not to do it, and then, in inspired moments of surprise, how to tell one so good you forgot what day it was, and I liked forgetting what day it was, so I made certain life choices that would allow me to get paid to forget what day it was and teach others to forget what day it was, which is, after all, what I think heaven probably is: the whole world, forgetting what day it is. You have to, I bet, with an endless supply of them.”
― Harrison Scott Key, The World's Largest Man

“But having people meet my family was a secret fear. It would be like taking someone to a dark room to show them my anal fissures, and you can't just go introducing everybody to your anal fissures. Only special people get to see such as that.”
― Harrison Scott Key, The World's Largest Man

“Why all of human history is so concerned with its fathers, I’ll never know. The mothers are so much nicer. The mothers cook us food and mail us brownies and fold our underwear. A mother quest, that would be nice. Where are our mothers? They are at home, waiting for us to call. They made spaghetti. Our favorite. So we go home, and we eat the spaghetti, and let them wash our underwear, and then it’s over. Mother quest. So nice.”
― Harrison Scott Key, The World's Largest Man: A Memoir

“What is a marriage? It’s not an economy, because spreadsheets cannot explain who should take out the garbage, and it’s not a logic problem, because an equation can’t tell you when to come home from the office, and it’s not a zero-sum game, because love only makes more love, and it’s not a hostage negotiation, where you make demands in exchange for what you want, because that’s called terrorism. No, Jesus was right. The only good metaphor for marriage is death, and man, I felt like I’d died.”
― Harrison Scott Key, The World's Largest Man: A Memoir

“which is, after all, what I think heaven probably is: the whole world, forgetting what day it is. You have to, I bet, with an endless supply of them.”
― Harrison Scott Key, The World's Largest Man: A Memoir

“As I got older, I filled out a little, foreshadowing my future girth and power, but still lacked hand-eye coordination, as well as eye-foot, foot-foot, and head-wall coordination.”
― Harrison Scott Key, The World's Largest Man: A Memoir

“fell more in love with Mississippi on that day, seeing what it could do, what could happen there, all the beauty and life that could come from nothing, so violently, suddenly. And I think it was on that day that I began to love its people, too, the Toms of this wild place, who could reach deep into God’s animals and pull forth wonders unbidden, such as other animals. I miss that. I miss those people.”
― Harrison Scott Key, The World's Largest Man: A Memoir

“You can be so close to a man for so many years, right there next to him in the car, and never know the worlds that turn inside him.”
― Harrison Scott Key, The World's Largest Man: A Memoir

“Telegram@velocemarco Buy Cocaine online in Adelaide”
― Harrison Scott Key, The World's Largest Man

“This was back before online banking, when the only way to tell how much money you had in the bank was to send a peregrine falcon to town and then wait two weeks for it to come back.”
― Harrison Scott Key, The World's Largest Man

“That first night alone, I tried holding the baby, not ceremonially, but actually, the way Pop had done with me, rocking, while my wife slept long and hard. I tried talking to this new person, which felt strange, but became easier, the more wine I drank.”
― Harrison Scott Key, The World's Largest Man

“That night, I went to the dance at McLaurrin. It was pretty amazing. The girls put their hands on our shoulders, and we put our hands on their hips, and we rocked slowly to Phil Collins's 'A Groovy Kind of Love,' each couple like a pair of metronomes with giant baby heads.”
― Harrison Scott Key, The World's Largest Man

“At McLaurin, there were fewer Good Country People, more Angry Trailer Park People, which was fun. They had a sparkle about them. And their fighting was intense. Even the girls fought. In most fights, the boys scrapped with other boys to reclaim something that had been taken from them, usually things named Sheila or Tammy, while Sheila and Tammy also fought somewhere nearby.”
― Harrison Scott Key, The World's Largest Man

“I was not encouraged, generally, to go grocery shopping with Mom, because Pop knew that if you sent your sons to the grocery store too much, they might learn how to locate water chestnuts, which could lead down a dark path toward vegetarian stir-fry and the wearing of aprons and eventually marrying someone named Cecil.”
― Harrison Scott Key, The World's Largest Man

“I had never really given much thought to what it might be like to kill a thing. Unlike most men in my family, I found it quite easy to romanticize animals, attributing to them deep human feeling. At the grocery store, I felt a strong desire to pray for the lobsters in the tank. I worried about them. At the very least, I felt, they must be extremely bored.”
― Harrison Scott Key, The World's Largest Man

“This was my responsibility, as a man, to endanger the people I love in the service of knowledge that seems important at the time.”
― Harrison Scott Key, The World's Largest Man: A Memoir

“Was I the only one who became unsettled and swoonish at the sight of a large, inverted carcass hanging from a tree, its vital organs strewn about like children's toys, the occasional pack of hunting dogs fighting over a lung, another one looking for a quiet place to enjoy the severed head? It happened all the time and nobody else seemed bothered. People just walked up to the bloody carcasses and carried on entirely normal conversations, as though a man wasn't standing there squeezing deer feces out of a large intestine and small children weren't playing football with a liver.”
― Harrison Scott Key, The World's Largest Man

“What really makes you alive is love.”
― Harrison Scott Key, The World's Largest Man