Last Exit to Brooklyn Quotes

“In the winter everyones hate was bare if you looked. She saw hate in the icicles that hung from her window; she saw it in the dirty slush on the streets; she heard it in the hail that scratched her window and bit her face; she could see it in the lowered heads hurrying to warm homes …”
― Hubert Selby Jr., Last Exit to Brooklyn

“high spirits and overflowing joy making the absence of love known.”
― Hubert Selby Jr., Last Exit to Brooklyn

“The bodies went back in the doors and bars and the heads in the windows. The cops drove away and Freddy and the guys went back into the Greeks and the street was quiet, just the sound of a tug and an occasional car; and even the blood couldn't be seen from a few feet away.”
― Hubert Selby Jr., Last Exit to Brooklyn

“...and yet there was not a definable thought in his mind. Only a terrifying effort to get from one side of a match box to another.”
― Hubert Selby Jr., Last Exit to Brooklyn

“(mistaking in his dull, never to be matured mind, her loneliness for respect of his strength and virility)”
― Hubert Selby Jr., Last Exit to Brooklyn

“But it was a bike and it moved. I think that sonofabitch woulda used it even if he had ta push it or pedal it like a kiddy car. So he kicks it over after 5 minutes and we listen to it cough and miss and Spook went puttin off with a shiteatin grin on his face and we went back up stairs and a few minutes later he comes back. Smilin all over the goddamn place and the strap of his hat under his chin. I tellya man, it was a pissa.”
― Hubert Selby Jr., Last Exit to Brooklyn

“Ya dont want yadinner taget cold, doya?”
― Hubert Selby Jr., Last Exit to Brooklyn

“Vinnie loves me. He loves me. It.
Wasn/t.
Shit”
― Hubert Selby Jr., Last Exit to Brooklyn

“I read so many different writers at the same time I did not have to work off any influences. Also, never having gone to school I didnt have to unlearn all the lies a person can learn in school about how you should write. I was unaware of the ‘rules of writing’ as proclaimed by individuals who had never written an original line in their lives. Fortunately, I had no recourse but to find my own way.”
― Hubert Selby Jr., Last Exit to Brooklyn

“In the winter everyones hate was bare if you looked.”
― Hubert Selby Jr., Last Exit to Brooklyn

“He had another cup of coffee, another cake, gulping them down, still looking at the clock every few minutes feeling a need to rush, no thought from what or to where, but only a vague yet crushing pressure of time, time that seemed to wrap itself around him like a python.”
― Hubert Selby Jr., Last Exit to Brooklyn

“The nightmare wasnt always exactly the same but after it was over it always seemed as if it had been. Year after year Harry would bolt up in bed occasionally, near dead with terror, trying to shove the weight off his chest so he could breathe and then slowly some familiar object would be seen and he would know he was finally awake.”
― Hubert Selby Jr., Last Exit to Brooklyn