White Palace Quotes

“He was supposed to be in love with her, for chrissakes. Yet the truth of it was, this news of her recent string of successes was paining him. He was jealous. He didn't know what he was jealous of, precisely, but the bitter fact remained: whatever was making Nora glow like this, it had nothing to do with him.”
― Glenn Savan, White Palace

“...Is it depressing or what?"
"Well," Max said, "I haven't committed suicide yet."
"But you've been thinking about it."
"Luckily, I haven't had that much leisure time.”
― Glenn Savan, White Palace

“He'd been obsessed for so long with Nora's unfitness for him that he'd failed to see that she might be perfectly suited to somebody else.”
― Glenn Savan, White Palace

“I don't berate myself for not having liked Janey better. It wasn't in my power to like her better. But I loved her and I fulfilled my obligations towards her — which just might be the very same thing, when you come right down to it.”
― Glenn Savan, White Palace

“It seem to me there are certain things you don't have the right to forgive yourself for."
"You could always look at it from the Catholic stand-point. Peter denied his own best lover three times, and he certainly didn't go to hell for it."
"I'm not St. Peter." Max said. "And if Nora turn out to be Jesus Christ, we're all in deep trouble.”
― Glenn Savan, White Palace

“After so much apprehension, the dreaded scene, now that he was in it, was nowhere near as horrifying as his fantasies.”
― Glenn Savan, White Palace

“Nora wasn't asking him to make her over into someone else; all she wanted was to borrow a few books. Was he such an effete intellectual as to think that an exposure to literature could work some kind of marvelous transformation in her? And what if it could? What if she awoke beside him one morning, having devoured Pride and Prejudice the night before, and was miraculously transfigured into an erudite, civilized woman? Would he still even want her at all?”
― Glenn Savan, White Palace

“It's about as comfortable as a roller-coaster."
"Oh? Do you fight?"
"We fight, all right."
"Who usually starts it?"
"Me."
"You? I find it hard to believe. What do you fight about?"
Max sighed. "I can't seems to accept her for what she is.”
― Glenn Savan, White Palace

“It was clear in certain ways why they were soaking their love affair in liquor. It eased the spots where their personalities scraped and softened their vision of each other, blurring their fundamental incompatibility.”
― Glenn Savan, White Palace

“What if he turns out to be a reasonable human being with a reasonable-sized ego?"
"Than I'll dedicate the rest of my life to the service of the Holy Mother and make a pilgrimage to Lourdes." Rosemary laughed. "People with reasonable-sized egos don't become MBAs, Max. They sell beers at the ballpark — or something.”
― Glenn Savan, White Palace

“And this was a class act indeed, pretending interest in this women's bitchy monologue so that later, as sore as he felt, she would admit him in bed, and all the while secretly despising her. Just what was he doing at this woman's table if that was how he felt?”
― Glenn Savan, White Palace

“Max's back crept. He was going where he wanted to go. It was odd, but the sensation of realized ambitions was not unlike the sensation of fear; he felt the floor flowing under him like water.”
― Glenn Savan, White Palace

“He learned from advertising that poor people were fiercely brand conscious. They wasted their money on advertised products because they were deathly afraid of wasting their money.”
― Glenn Savan, White Palace

“... it seemed to Max that what people kept in their refrigerators was every bit as indicative of their personalities as what they kept in their shelves.”
― Glenn Savan, White Palace

“Max had no patience with the Judeo-Christian concept of a consistent, judicious, grandfatherly deity. Give him fickle universe rampant with mischievous demons and self-indulgent demigods - all the good evidence pointed to such a model.”
― Glenn Savan, White Palace

“Houses, he supposed, like human personalities, contained anomalous corners that refused to fit in with the rest of the general pattern. In her housekeeping habits Nora was like a brutal serial murderer who nevertheless when to Mass every morning and never forgot her mother's birthday.”
― Glenn Savan, White Palace

“People liked to believe that tragedies are interchangeable, that they bought you entrance into some kind of brotherhood of grief, where empathy among members was exalted, telepathic, but this is was probably because they needed to believe that tragedy taught you something, that is wasn't a total waste, that the prize you received in lieu of your loss was a new level of understanding. Max didn't view his bereavement as particularly educational, however. All he new now that he hadn't known before was what he should have known in the first place: no one was safe.”
― Glenn Savan, White Palace

“In conversation he was always ready to champion the wretched of the earth, but in reality he did not like to be in their vicinity - especially on September evening as hot as this one.”
― Glenn Savan, White Palace

“Max's own profession, advertising, was partly at fault; cars were fun, cars were penises, cars were expressions of your life-style and weltanshauung, cars were everything, in fact, except what they were: huge hunk of metal hurtling through space with not regards for humane life, usually commandeered by mental deficiencies.”
― Glenn Savan, White Palace

“Big things were built out of small things; and it was always in the small things first that principles were compromised away until they were compromised away entirely.”
― Glenn Savan, White Palace

“He was, at least, surviving with dignity, and while he never kidded himself into thinking this was enough, it was certainly better than some of alternative. He had not lost his mind, or his will, or his decency, or, he hoped, his sense of humor. He had simply lost his taste for life, and that, he'd discovered, was not a prerequisite for living.”
― Glenn Savan, White Palace

“It gave him a kind of nervous satisfaction to see his basic grievance against reality confirmed once again by reality itself; nothing hold still. Every time you turned out around, something else had gone rotten, or fallen into despair, or disappeared entirely. In a universe that couldn't be trusted, that could at any moment just as likely as not blow up in your face like a bomb, you had to carve out your own island of order and control, however arbitrary, however illusory, just to keep going.”
― Glenn Savan, White Palace