Hard Rain Falling Quotes

“How do you wake up? It was one thing to know that you had been asleep all your life, but something else to wake up from it, to find out you were really alive and it wasn't anybody's fault but your own. Of course that was the problem.

All right. Everything is a dream. Nothing hangs together. You move from one dream to another and there is no reason for the change. Your eyes see things and your ears hear, but nothing has any reason behind it. It would be easier to believe in God. Then you could wake up and yawn and stretch and grin at a world that was put together on a plan of mercy and death, punishment for evil, joy for good, and if the game was crazy at least it had rules. But that didn't make sense. It had never made any sense. The trouble was, now that he was not asleep and not awake, what he saw and heard didn't make sense either.

Mishmash, he thought. You know enough to know how you feel is senseless, but you don't know enough to know why.”
― Don Carpenter, Hard Rain Falling

“When you lose you lose forever, an when you win it only lasts a second or two.”
― Don Carpenter, Hard Rain Falling

“All night long, in his cell, he burned with hatred. It did not matter what he thought, it was how he felt; and alone in the darkness of his cell, with the muttering noises of the tank around him, he felt like murdering the universe.”
― Don Carpenter, Hard Rain Falling

“Didn't they understand that for some people the opera, the drama, the ballet, were only boring, and yet a peepshow on Market Street was art? They want to make everything gray and tasteful. Don't they understand how awful good taste seems to people who don't have it? Ha, what do they care about people with bad taste! Nothing. But I do. I love them. They wear cheap perfume and carry transistor radios. They buy plastic dog turds and painted turtles and pennants and signs that say, "I don't swim in your toilet, so please don't pee in my pool!" and they buy smelly popcorn and eat it on the street and go to bad movies and stand here in doorways sneaking nips of whiskey just like I'm doing, and they're all so nice.”
― Don Carpenter, Hard Rain Falling

“By then he would realize that the freedom he had always yearned for and never understood was beyond his or any man’s reach, and that all men must yearn for it equally; a freedom from the society of mankind without its absence; a freedom from connection, from fear, from trouble, and above all from the loneliness of being alive. By then he would understand that fulfillment was only temporary, and desire the enemy of death.”
― Don Carpenter, Hard Rain Falling

“It was an arrangement, coldly conceived for sexual gratification, without even words that first time, but limited by coldly precise and rational language from there on out. The terms were that they would use each other’s bodies for that ornate form of masturbation called Making Love, but there was to be no question of emotional involvement, or prying into one another’s soul. This, they decided coldly, would keep them from going crazy.”
― Don Carpenter, Hard Rain Falling

“But he could not go on allowing his emotions to rise and fall at Sally’s whim.”
― Don Carpenter, Hard Rain Falling

“Remove,’ I said to myself, `the impetus to private ownership, and you have made the first giant step toward removing the causes of injustice in the world. There would be no greed if there were no possessions, no jealousy, no envy, perhaps even no hatred.”
― Don Carpenter, Hard Rain Falling

“So what was his life? Look out there at all the ten million things life can be, and tell yourself which are yours, and which you will never do. And there was the agony of it; so much he wanted to do, and so little he could do. Why wasn’t he content to be what he was? After all, look at it rationally. He was one in ten thousand already.”
― Don Carpenter, Hard Rain Falling

“Everything is a dream. Nothing hangs together. You move from one dream to another and there is no reason for the change. Your eyes see things and your ears hear, but nothing has any reason behind it. It would be easier to believe in God. Then you could wake up and yawn and stretch and grin at a world that was put together on a plan of mercy and death, punishment for evil, joy for good, and if the game was crazy at least it had rules. But that didn’t make sense. It had never made any sense.”
― Don Carpenter, Hard Rain Falling

“Gradually, through his books, his records, his long walks alone, the mere passage of time, he would begin to come to terms with his life as it was. He became an observer. He began to taste his food and to smell the air. He saw things and felt them. The earth became real, and at times he was capable of sensing the pleasure of existence”
― Don Carpenter, Hard Rain Falling

“He felt a stirring of anger, not at society for failing to have provided him with money; not at himself for his refusal to work; but at the situation itself, for existing.”
― Don Carpenter, Hard Rain Falling

“Years before he had said and meant, “Fuck the niggers”—he had seen too many of his friends swallowed up in bitterness, and he wanted to escape, not drown. But now there was no escape and he was in the awful position of seeing his children grow toward that moment when they would know, would be shown, told, that they were niggers and not human beings. Because no matter how Billy twisted and dodged his way through life he could not get away from the central fact of his existence; whether he liked it or not, he was black, and there was nothing he could do about it, no action he could take without first thinking about it. It was just there. He could not love it or fight it or be proud of it, it was just there. He could not even hate it any more. His children were beautiful; how could anybody be so cruel? They were so affectionate and full of joy, so eager and innocent; why did somebody have to come along and with one stiff, ugly word, cut the innocence out of them? From the moment they understood that word they would proceed through life half-murdered of their ability to love; the moment their eyes became wary they would cease to be children, and Billy was certain that he himself would not love them so much. It might have been better, he thought with bitterness, if they had not been born at all; and then he saw them in his mind and knew that he could not stand their nonexistence; life without them would be life without life. And some day, a white kid, innocent himself, would tell them who they were, and there would be no path for Billy’s rage, no one for him to murder, only the emptiness of despair and frustration as he saw the hurt eyes of his children.”
― Don Carpenter, Hard Rain Falling

“He came to see that marriage was not an institution, not even an idea, but a rational social process whose function was to raise children properly.”
― Don Carpenter, Hard Rain Falling

“It was an awful word. Nothing. It made him sick at heart. He refused to believe it. Hebdemanded that there be something he could do. He demanded that his love be worth something to his child. If it wasn't, life was garbage. He hd to rulenout the idea that life was just a matter of accident, of percentages, because it was just too goddamn much to stand for. There had to be some way you could make yourself be felt.”
― Don Carpenter, Hard Rain Falling

“He promptly forgot all about being the hero of a coward’s nightmare,”
― Don Carpenter, Hard Rain Falling

“How do you wake up? It was one thing to know that you had been asleep all your life, but something else to wake up from it, to find out you were really alive and it wasn't anybody's fault but your own. Of course that was the problem.”
― Don Carpenter, Hard Rain Falling

“He did not want to see the war movie. It would be full of shit.”
― Don Carpenter, Hard Rain Falling

“He had to rule out the idea that life was just a matter of accident”
― Don Carpenter, Hard Rain Falling

“realized that he really didn’t know anything about tides. There was so much for him to learn about things”
― Don Carpenter, Hard Rain Falling

“How do you wake up? It was one thing to know that you had been asleep all your life, but something else to wake up from it, to find out you were really alive and it wasn't anybody's fault but your own. Of course that was the problem.

All right. Everything is a dream. Nothing hangs together. You move from one dream to another and there is no reason for the change. Your eyes see things and your ears hear, but nothing has any reason behind it. It would be easier to believe in God. Then you could wake up and yawn and stretch and grin at a world that was put together on a plan of mercy and death, punishment for evil, joy for good, and if the game was crazy at least it had rules. But that didn't make sense. It had never made any sense. The trouble was, now that he was not asleep and not awake, what he saw and heard didn't make sense either.

Mishmash, he thought. You know enough to know how you feel is senseless, but you don't know enough to know why.”
― Don Carpenter, Hard Rain Falling

“Why don’t you get a job?” he asked. Denny looked at him strangely. “Fuck that shit,”
― Don Carpenter, Hard Rain Falling

“But then”
― Don Carpenter, Hard Rain Falling

“He was legally a fugitive from the orphanage”
― Don Carpenter, Hard Rain Falling

“How do you wake up? It was one thing to know that you had been asleep all your life, but something else to to wake up from it, to find out you were really alive and it wasn't anybody's fault but your own. Of course, that was the problem.”
― Don Carpenter, Hard Rain Falling

“He drank off about half the pint, jammed the bottle into his hip pocket, and took off for Market Street. When he left his room he was angry, and determined to make trouble, but by the time he got down to Market he felt just fine and sauntered along with the early evening crowd, savoring the pure freedom of it, the way people all dressed differently, the way the women looked and smelled, the way the streetcars sounded, the glitter of the lights, the strange, exciting music from the hot-dog joints, the corniness of it all, the cheapness, the vulgarity which is vulgar only if you haven’t been away for such a long time and in a place so dull as prison; there was a lot of stuff in the newspapers about “cleaning up” Market Street, and Jack wondered why they wanted to do it. Didn’t they know how beautiful it was? Didn’t they understand that for some people the opera, the drama, the ballet, were only boring, and yet a peepshow on Market Street was art? They want to make everything gray and tasteful. Don’t they understand how awful good taste seems to people who don’t have it? Ha, what do they care about people with bad taste! Nothing! But I do. I love them. They wear cheap perfume and carry transistor radios. They buy plastic dog-turds and painted turtles and pennants and signs that say, “I don’t swim in your toilet, so please don’t pee in my pool!” and they buy smelly popcorn and eat it on the street and go to bad movies and stand here in doorways sneaking nips of whiskey just like I’m doing, and they’re all so nice.”
― Don Carpenter, Hard Rain Falling

“Maybe his wife would be out under the late sun, gardening. He would speak to her. She would straighten up, turn, smile. The glare would make it hard for him to see her smile, but he would know, and a little of it would slip away. It would take part of him with it, but it was worth it.”
― Don Carpenter, Hard Rain Falling

“He did not add that he had also bucked logs, worked in a cannery and a furniture factory, robbed gas stations, rolled drunks, and lived in half a hundred arid furnished rooms, pretended the vacuum was freedom, wakened almost daily to the fear that time was a dry wind brushing away his youth and his strength, and slept through as many nightmares as there were nights to dream.”
― Don Carpenter, Hard Rain Falling

“He did not add that he had also bucked logs, worked in a cannery and a furniture factory, robbed gas stations, rolled drunks, and lived in half a hundred arid furnished rooms, pretended the vacuum was freedom, wakened almost daily to the fear that time was a dry wind brushing away his youth and his strength, and slept through as many nightmares as there were nights to dream. He just sat and smiled at Denny and saw what time had done to him and wondered, now comfortably, why he was so bothered by time. It happens to everybody this way, he thought, we sit here and get older and die and nothing happens.”
― Don Carpenter, Hard Rain Falling

“She watched him from the beach as he went farther and farther out on the reef, and saw him at last on the final edge, staring toward the open sea, breakers crashing beside his tiny figure, and she knew there were all sorts of romantic ideas pouring through his mind about life, the sea, nature, the size of the universe, man is a tiny creature, etc. etc. But she did not feel like sneering at him for it; she began to have images of this man, locked somewhere in a prison cell away from all possible thoughts of immensity, and she felt a great wave of pity for him, for the loss of his youth, for his naive, childlike expectation that the past was all over and he could just start from where he was and bury it all behind him and become a cultured person. It made her feel so bitter she wanted to cry.”
― Don Carpenter, Hard Rain Falling