The Lost Boys of Montauk Quotes

“her mind, it was better to beg for forgiveness than ask permission.”
― Amanda M. Fairbanks, The Lost Boys of Montauk: The True Story of the Wind Blown, Four Men Who Vanished at Sea, and the Survivors They Left Behind

“We all know that if we are to live ourselves there comes a time when we must relinquish the dead, let them go, keep them dead. Let them become the photograph on the table. Let them become the name on the trust accounts. Let go of them in the water. Knowing this does not make it any easier to let go of them in the water.” —Joan Didion, The Year of Magical Thinking: The Play”
― Amanda M. Fairbanks, The Lost Boys of Montauk: The True Story of the Wind Blown, Four Men Who Vanished at Sea, and the Survivors They Left Behind

“He wasn’t being interrogated with trivia questions or being asked what, exactly, it was he planned to do with his life.”
― Amanda M. Fairbanks, The Lost Boys of Montauk: The True Story of the Wind Blown, Four Men Who Vanished at Sea, and the Survivors They Left Behind

“Woven deep within this story is the notion of I told you so. It’s certainly the vantage point of Alice, and the source of the guilt that consumes her, all these decades later, for not forcing her son to get off that goddamn fishing boat.”
― Amanda M. Fairbanks, The Lost Boys of Montauk: The True Story of the Wind Blown, Four Men Who Vanished at Sea, and the Survivors They Left Behind

“Apparently, trauma can interfere with developmental growth and often freezes people at the emotional age they were when the trauma first occurred.”
― Amanda M. Fairbanks, The Lost Boys of Montauk: The True Story of the Wind Blown, Four Men Who Vanished at Sea, and the Survivors They Left Behind

“Betty Friedan’s 1963 best seller The Feminine Mystique, which gave voice to “the problem that has no name.”
― Amanda M. Fairbanks, The Lost Boys of Montauk: The True Story of the Wind Blown, Four Men Who Vanished at Sea, and the Survivors They Left Behind

“As a boy, he’d done it with joy. Now his steely demeanor, coupled with the increasing time he spent aboard a commercial fishing boat, made Barry wonder whether, consciously or not, Dave had made peace with his ultimate destiny of someday dying at sea.”
― Amanda M. Fairbanks, The Lost Boys of Montauk: The True Story of the Wind Blown, Four Men Who Vanished at Sea, and the Survivors They Left Behind

“Their fathers, who had come of age during the Second World War, weren’t emotionally accessible.”
― Amanda M. Fairbanks, The Lost Boys of Montauk: The True Story of the Wind Blown, Four Men Who Vanished at Sea, and the Survivors They Left Behind

“As long as you’re willing and able to keep your bilious thoughts to yourself and arrive in the right clothes, just about any white person can pass as a member of the privileged class. Maybe that willingness and ability to pass is all wealth is.”
― Amanda M. Fairbanks, The Lost Boys of Montauk: The True Story of the Wind Blown, Four Men Who Vanished at Sea, and the Survivors They Left Behind

“With a fatality rate twenty to thirty times higher than that of other occupations, commercial fishing is among the most dangerous jobs in the nation. Sinking”
― Amanda M. Fairbanks, The Lost Boys of Montauk: The True Story of the Wind Blown, Four Men Who Vanished at Sea, and the Survivors They Left Behind