Youngblood Hawke Quotes

“The toiling masses,' and all that. This country has no toiling masses, we have Dan at the diner and Verne in the mine and Jerry in the steel mill and Burdette at the filling station and so on. They don't toil, for Christ's sake, they do a day's work and then they go home and have a beer. You can't get them into a mass for anything. If there's a good ball game on TV they won't come out to see the president ride by.”
― Herman Wouk, Youngblood Hawke

“in an industrial world the many cannot rule themselves, that they must drift into ever greater sloth, indifference, anarchy, self-seeking, dreaminess, and moral decay. Power flows to the cunning, and the rule of the many becomes the rule of money.”
― Herman Wouk, Youngblood Hawke: A Novel

“I have found out what it's like to be crazy. It is to stand apart and observe ordinary life all around you with the panic of an actor on stage who has forgotten his lines and his business. What one doesn't realize in ordinary mental health is that daily life is a show. You have to put on a right costume, to improvise right speeches, to do right actions, and all this isn't automatic, it takes concentration and work and a simply amazing degree of control!”
― Herman Wouk, Youngblood Hawke

“I have found out what it's like to be crazy. It is to stand apart and observe ordinary life all around you with the panic of an actor on stage who has forgotten his lines and his business. What one doesn't realize in ordinary mental health is that daily life is a show. You have to put on a right costume, to improvise right speeches, to do right actions, and all this isn't automatic, it takes concentration and work and a simply”
― Herman Wouk, Youngblood Hawke

“the old nightmare of the one true friend I’ve missed knowing, the one wise book that’s on a shelf somewhere that I’ve never been able to find, the one error in judgment I made long ago, I don’t know when or where, the one wrong turn that put me on the wrong road which I keep stumbling along, further and further from the friend I should have met, the book I should have”
― Herman Wouk, Youngblood Hawke: A Novel

“People who can solve a lot of problems by simply dying are the ones who hang on and on.”
― Herman Wouk, Youngblood Hawke

“Nothing testified more to the evanescence of position and wealth in Beverly Hills than its architecture. There was money in abundance to put up the settings of the grand life. But land—the one true mark of stable grandeur—was not to be had. The town was an industrial compound of the temporarily well-paid.”
― Herman Wouk, Youngblood Hawke

“Judd sighed. "I don't know why people take criticism so seriously. One good creator is worth all the critics who ever lived." "Criticism is necessary to literature," Hawke said, and felt a fierce disgust with himself. It was as though he were trying to soothe a homicidal lunatic. Judd said, "Nonsense, criticism is a minor form of entertainment, a sort of piggy-back writing that rides on other men's work.”
― Herman Wouk, Youngblood Hawke

“bankruptcy is a scar that never comes off. It marks you as a fool or a shoddy dealer.”
― Herman Wouk, Youngblood Hawke: A Novel

“Do you have a girl?" "No." "Don't you get, well, hungry now and then?" "Damned hungry." "What do you do?" "Hunger, mostly." Maas uttered a short barking laugh. "My dear lad. Big and strong, and if I may say so, winning as you are?" "I'd rather be hungry than involved. My trouble is I don't know how to be casual. Even if it's a waitress, I have to make a goddess of her in my own mind, I don't know why.”
― Herman Wouk, Youngblood Hawke