The Man with the Golden Arm Quotes

“There's people in hell who want ice water.”
― Nelson Algren, The Man with the Golden Arm

“He was falling between glacial walls, he didn't know how anyone could fall so far away from everyone else in the world. So far to fall, so cold all the way, so steep and dark between those morphine-coloured walls...”
― Nelson Algren, The Man with the Golden Arm

“If Jesus Christ treated me like you do, I’d drive in the nails myself.”
― Nelson Algren, The Man with the Golden Arm

“I couldn't buy the lice off a sick cat," the cabbie answered from the very depths of self-deprecation.”
― Nelson Algren, The Man with the Golden Arm

“For way down there, in a shot glass's false bottom, everything was bound to turn out fine after all.”
― Nelson Algren, The Man with the Golden Arm

“Heroin got the drive awright-but there’s not a tingle to a ton-you got to get M to get the tingle-tingle.”
― Nelson Algren, The Man with the Golden Arm

“Then the wooden benches along the walls, where so many outcasts had slept, would be lit by a sort of slow, clocked lightning til the bulb steadied and fastened its tiny feral fury upon the center of the room like a single sullen and manic eye. To burn on there with a steady hate. Til morning wearied and dimmed it away to nothing more than some sort of little old lost gray child of a district-station moon, all its hatred spent.”
― Nelson Algren, The Man with the Golden Arm

“It kills me in the heart, how you are now,” Sparrow couldn’t keep from saying. “It just ain’t like bein’ Frankie no more.” “That’s the hardest thing of all for me to be, Solly,” Frankie told him with a strange gentleness. “I’m gettin’ farther away from myself all the time.”
― Nelson Algren, The Man with the Golden Arm

“On the other side of the window a prairie snow fell across backstreet and tenement, looking for dry leaves upon which to rest and finding only concrete and steel.”
― Nelson Algren, The Man with the Golden Arm

“For those nearest our hearts are the ones most likely to tread upon them.”
― Nelson Algren, The Man with the Golden Arm

“The great, secret and special American guilt of owning nothing, nothing at all, in the one land where ownership and virtue are one. Guilt that lay crouched behind every billboard which gave each man his commandments; for each man here had failed the billboards all down the line. No Ford in this one’s future nor ever any place all his own. Had failed before the radio commercials, by the streetcar plugs and by the standards of every self-respecting magazine. With his own eyes he had seen the truer Americans mount the broad stone stairways to success surely and swiftly and unaided by others; he was always the one left alone, it seemed at last, without enough sense of honor to climb off a West Madison Street Keep-Our-City-Clean box and not enough ambition to raise his eyes back to the billboards.”
― Nelson Algren, The Man with the Golden Arm

“Nelson Algren wrote once that “literature is made upon any occasion that a challenge is put to the legal apparatus by conscience in touch with humanity.”
― Nelson Algren, The Man with the Golden Arm

“F. SCOTT FITZGERALD In the real dark night of the soul it is always three o’clock in the morning, day after day.”
― Nelson Algren, The Man with the Golden Arm

“Frankie turned away. It seemed that everything that ever happened to him had begun with some hound or other’s aimless yapping.”
― Nelson Algren, The Man with the Golden Arm

“For the man on the needle, though he be your brother, is a stranger to every human who lives without morphine.”
― Nelson Algren, The Man with the Golden Arm

“Must be good whisky you’re sellin’, Owner,” Frankie had flattered Antek. “They come in here on crutches ’n walk out by theirselves.”
― Nelson Algren, The Man with the Golden Arm

“Though he had seen not one man of them in his life before, Frankie knew each man. For each was seared by that same torch whose flame had already touched himself. A torch which burned with a dark and smoldering flame from within till it dried a man of everything save a dark-charred guilt.”
― Nelson Algren, The Man with the Golden Arm

“He’s like me,” Frankie explained, “never drinks. Unless he’s alone or with somebody.”
― Nelson Algren, The Man with the Golden Arm

“Any time you want me, Captain, just phone by Antek, he’ll come ’n tell me I got to come down ’n get arrested. I like gettin’ locked up now ’n then, it’s how a guy stays out of trouble. I’ll grab a cab if you’re in a real big hurry to pinch me sometime—I don’t like bein’ late when I got a chance of doin’ thirty days for somethin’ I never done.”
― Nelson Algren, The Man with the Golden Arm

“Tonight, just as the wan winter-evening light fanned out into all the colors of the hustlers' night, God tossed a handful of city rain across the green and red tavern legends like tossing a handful of red and green confetti. Overhead the wavering warning lamps of the El began casting a blood-colored light down the rails to guide the empty cars of evening down all the nameless tunnels of the night.”
― Nelson Algren, The Man with the Golden Arm