The Dog of the South Quotes

“As for his height, I would put it at no more than five feet nine inches — he being fully erect, out of his monkey crouch — and yet he brazenly put down five feet eleven on all forms and applications … He wore glasses, the lenses thick and greasy, which distorted the things of the world into unnatural shapes. I myself have never needed glasses. I can read roadsigns a halfmile away and I can see individual stars and planets to the seventh magnitude with no optical aids whatever. I can see Uranus.”
― Charles Portis, The Dog of the South

“The kind of people I know now don’t have barbecues, Mama. They stand up alone at nights in small rooms and eat cold weenies. My so-called friends are bums. Many of them are nothing but rats. They spread T.B. and use dirty language. They’re wife-beaters and window peepers and night crawlers and dope fiends. They have running sores on the backs of their hands that never heal. They peer up from cracks in the floor with their small red eyes and wait for chances.”
― Charles Portis, The Dog of the South

“In South Texas I saw three interesting things. The first was a tiny girl, maybe ten years old, driving in a 1965 Cadillac. She wasn't going very fast, because I passed her, but still she was cruising right along, with her head tilted back and her mouth open and her little hands gripping the wheel.

Then I saw an old man walking up the median strip pulling a wooden cross behind him. It was mounted on something like a golf cart with two spoked wheels. I slowed down to read the hand-lettered sign on his chest.

JACKSONVILLE
FLA OR BUST

I had never been to Jacksonville but I knew it was the home of the Gator Bowl and I had heard it was a boom town, taking in an entire county or some such thing. It seemed an odd destination for a religious pilgrim. Penance maybe for some terrible sin, or some bargain he had worked out with God, or maybe just a crazed hiker. I waved and called out to him, wishing him luck, but he was intent on his marching and had no time for idle greetings. His step was brisk and I was convinced he wouldn't bust.

The third interesting thing was a convoy of stake-bed trucks all piled high with loose watermelons and cantaloupes. I was amazed. I couldn't believe that the bottom ones weren't crushed under all that weight, exploding and spraying hazardous melon juice onto the highway. One of nature's tricks with curved surfaces. Topology! I had never made it that far in mathematics and engineering studies, and I knew now that I never would, just as I knew that I would never be a navy pilot or a Treasury agent. I made a B in Statics but I was failing in Dynamics when I withdrew from the field. The course I liked best was one called Strength of Materials. Everybody else hated it because of all the tables we had to memorize but I loved it, the sheared beam. I had once tried to explain to Dupree how things fell apart from being pulled and compressed and twisted and bent and sheared but he wouldn't listen. Whenever that kind of thing came up, he would always say - boast, the way those people do - that he had no head for figures and couldn't do things with his hands, slyly suggesting the presence of finer qualities.”
― Charles Portis, The Dog of the South

“When the beer came, I dipped a finger in it and wet down each corner of the paper napkin to anchor it, so it would not come up with the mug each time and make me appear ridiculous. I”
― Charles Portis, The Dog of the South

“She gave me a pledge card, a card promising an annual gift of $5, $10, or $25 toward the support of the Unity mission. I filled it out under the hot light of the projector. The name and address spaces were much too short, unless you wrote a very fine hand or unless your name was Ed Poe and you lived at 1 Elm St.”
― Charles Portis, The Dog of the South

“What is your work in this world?” “I don’t know what it is yet. I’m back in school now.” “It’s getting pretty late in the day for you to have so few interests and convictions. How old are you, Mr. Midge?”
― Charles Portis, The Dog of the South

“A lot of people leave Arkansas and most of them come back sooner or later. They can’t quite achieve escape velocity.”
― Charles Portis, The Dog of the South

“At one end of the field there was a square lump of a motor home and at the other end was an old school bus that had been painted white and rigged as a camper. The bus had been given a name, “The Dog of the South,” which was painted in black on one side, but not by a sign painter with a straight-edge and a steady hand. The big childish letters sprawled at different angles and dribbled at the bottom. The white paint had also been applied in a slapdash manner, and it had drawn up in places, presenting a crinkled finish like that seen on old adding machines and cash registers. This thing was a hippie wagon.”
― Charles Portis, The Dog of the South

“I'm white and I don't dance, but that doesn't mean I have all the answers.”
― Charles Portis, The Dog of the South

“I tried not to show much interest in his story after the way he had dozed while I was telling mine. It didn’t matter, because he paid no attention to other people anyway. He spoke conversational English to all the Mexicans along the way and never seemed to notice that they couldn’t understand a word he said.”
― Charles Portis, The Dog of the South

“Then there was a disturbance in the kitchen and he went to investigate. When he came back, he said, “It was nothing, the mop caught fire. All my employees are fools.”
― Charles Portis, The Dog of the South

“To the best of my knowledge he had never even voted, and then someone must have told him something about politics, some convincing lie, or he read something—it’s usually one or the other—and he stopped being funny and turned mean and silent. That wasn’t so bad, but then he stopped being silent.”
― Charles Portis, The Dog of the South

“wind came up through the floor hole in such a way that the Heath wrappers were suspended behind my head in a noisy brown vortex”
― Charles Portis, The Dog of the South

“An earlier plan to marry again had collapsed when her fiancé was killed in a motorcycle accident. His name was Don and he had taught oriental methods of self-defense in a martial arts academy. "They called it an accident," she said, "but I think the government had him killed because he knew too much about flying saucers.”
― Charles Portis, The Dog of the South

“The big problem was the typing. When you run up against a policeman at a typewriter, you might as well get a Coke and relax.”
― Charles Portis, The Dog of the South

“I ordered a glass of beer and arranged my coins before me on the bar in columns according to value. When the beer came, I dipped a finger in it and wet down each corner of the paper napkin to anchor it, so it would not come up with the mug each time and make me appear ridiculous. I drank from the side of the mug that a left-handed person would use, in the belief that fewer mouths had been on that side.”
― Charles Portis, The Dog of the South

“Not even my food was safe. She ate very little, in fact, but if some attractive morsel on my plate happened to catch her eye she would spear it and eat it in a flash without acknowledging that she had done anything out of the way. She knew I didn’t like that. I didn’t tamper with her plate and she knew I didn’t like her tampering with my plate. If the individual place setting means no more than that, then it is all a poor joke and you might as well have a trough and be done with it.”
― Charles Portis, The Dog of the South

“Idleness and solitude led to these dramatics: an ordinary turd indulging himself as the chief of sinners.”
― Charles Portis, The Dog of the South

“I’d have Lee too, and Jackson and Albert Sidney Johnston, walking around the midway. Hire some people with beards, you know, to do that. I wouldn’t have Braxton Bragg or Joseph E. Johnston. Every afternoon at three Lee would take off his gray coat and wrestle an alligator in a mud hole. Prize drawings. A lot of T-shirts and maybe a few black-and-white portables. If you don’t like that, how about a stock-car track? Year-round racing with hardly any rules. Deadly curves right on the water. The Symes 500 on Christmas day. Get a promotional tie-in with the Sugar Bowl. How about an industrial park? How about a high-rise condominium with a roof garden? How about a baseball clinic? How about a monkey island? I don’t say it would be cheap. Nobody’s going to pay to see one or two monkeys these days. People want to see a lot of monkeys. I’ve got plenty of ideas but first I have to get my hands on the island.”
― Charles Portis, The Dog of the South

“Webster Spooner carried my bag upstairs and showed me to my room. He said he would keep an eye on the car. I didn’t see how he was going to do that from his box. I knew he was a sound sleeper. The woman Ruth had almost had to kill him to get him awake.”
― Charles Portis, The Dog of the South

“Well, it was right in there where I lost him. That traffic circle is where he tore his britches. I never saw him after that. He has no chin, you know.” “You told me that.” “Captain Hughes of the Rangers used to say that if they ever hanged old Ski they would have to put the rope under his nose.”
― Charles Portis, The Dog of the South

“You’ll have to get your own lawyer, Dupree.” “Where am I supposed to get him? I’ve called every son of a bitch in the yellow pages.” A good lawyer, he thought, would be able to forestall the psychiatric examination at the prison hospital in Springfield, Missouri. That examination was what he feared most, and with good reason, even though the finding would no doubt have provided a solid defense.”
― Charles Portis, The Dog of the South

“I was pleased too that I was in Mexico and not at home, but that works both ways because after sunrise I met Americans driving out of Mexico and they all appeared to be singing happy songs. I waved at children carrying buckets of water and at old women with shawls on their heads. It was a chilly morning. I’m a gringo of goodwill in a small Buick! I’ll try to observe your customs! That was what I put into my waves.”
― Charles Portis, The Dog of the South

“You could look on a dollar as a tip and you could also look on it as a small bribe. I was afraid one of these fellows might turn out to be a zealot like Bruce Wayne, whose parents were murdered by crooks and who had dedicated his entire life to the fight against crime. An attempted bribe, followed by the discovery of a pistol concealed in a pie carton, and I would really be in the soup. But nothing happened. They palmed those dollars like carnival guys and nobody looked into anything. The customs man marked my suitcase with a piece of chalk and a porter stuck the decals on my windows and I was gone. I was free and clear in Mexico with my Colt Cobra.”
― Charles Portis, The Dog of the South