The Ice Storm Quotes

“The past was so past it hurt.”
― Rick Moody, The Ice Storm

“Words are the oldest information storage and retrieval system ever devised. Words are probably older than the cave paintings in France, words have been here for tens of thousands of years longer than film, moving pictures, video, and digital video, and words will likely be here after those media too. When the electromagnetic pulse comes in the wake of the nuclear blast? Those computers and digital video cameras and videotape recorders that are not melted outright will be plastic and metal husks used to prop open doors. Not so with the utterances of tongues. Words will remain, and the highly complicated and idiosyncratic accounts assembled from them will provide us with the dark news about the blast. The written word will remain, scribbled on collapsed highway overpasses, as a testament to love and rage, as evidence of the wanderers in the ruin.”
― Rick Moody, The Ice Storm

“Fucking family. Feeble and forlorn and floundering and foolish and frustrating and functional and sad, sad. Fucking family. Fiend or foe.”
― Rick Moody, The Ice Storm

“Death was terribly durable. It was the sturdiest idea around. A body was dead, and before long it wasn't even a body anymore, it was just elements. But it was still dead.”
― Rick Moody, The Ice Storm

“It was monks who first taught the art of reading in silence. During the Dark Ages. Augustine, perhaps, was first. And silence was a tongue Elena understood. Silence was her idiom for support and caring. Silence was permissive and contemplative and nonconfrontational and there was melody to it. It was both earth and ether.”
― Rick Moody, The Ice Storm

“Deviants and losers and mutants and the loveless...were the proper readers of Marvel comics.”
― Rick Moody, The Ice Storm

“He had been lonely even in his wife’s arms, lonely in crowds, lonely at meetings, lonely throwing tennis balls for his dog, lonely playing Operation with his kids. He had been lonely during commuter conversations, lonely during late-night heart-to-hearts with old fraternity brothers. His dad, living alone up in New Hampshire, made Hood lonely. The severe landscapes of November made him lonely.”
― Rick Moody, The Ice Storm

“The idea of betrayal was in the air. The Summer of Love had migrated, in its drug-resistant strain, to the Connecticut suburbs about five years after its initial introduction.”
― Rick Moody, The Ice Storm

“Being right and being happy are on opposite ends of this dance that is the life of human machines.”
― Rick Moody, The Ice Storm

“Reading was a brave spiritual journey for Elena Hood, and little piles of books were for her like the stacks of rubble—the Tibetan prayer walls—that marked the progress of pilgrims.”
― Rick Moody, The Ice Storm