The Night Listener Quotes

“I don't see myself very clearly.
Then look at the people who love you...Look into their eyes and see what they're seeing; that's all you need to know yourself.”
― Armistead Maupin, The Night Listener

“Pete thinks we all have a blacking factory: some awful moment, early on, when we surrender our childish hearts as surely as we lose our baby teeth.”
― Armistead Maupin, The Night Listener

“Such a suitable word, stroke. I'd heard it since childhood without fully understanding its meaning, but it sounded, even through a haze of sleep and dope, just like itself: abrupt and brutal and irreversible. A stroke of lightning, the stroke of midnight, the stroke of a pen.”
― Armistead Maupin, The Night Listener

“Two days after his twelfth birthday, a fortnight before his father was jailed for debt, Charles Dickens was sent to work in a blacking factory. There, in a rat-infested room by the docks, he sat for twelve hours a day, labelling boot polish and learning the pain of abandonment. While he never spoke publicly of this ordeal, it would always be with him: in his social conscience and burning ambition, in the hordes of innocent children who languished and died in his fiction.

Pete thinks we all have a blacking factory: some awful moment, early on, when we surrender our childish hearts as surely as we lose our baby teeth. And the outcome can't be called. Some of us end up like Dickens, others like Jeffrey Dahmer. It's not a question of good or evil, Pete believes. Just the random brutality of the universe and our native ability to withstand it.”
― Armistead Maupin, The Night Listener

“Such a suitable word, stroke. I'd heard it since childhood without fully understanding its meaning, but it sounded, even through a haze of sleep and dope, just like itself: abrupt and brutal and irreversible.
A stroke of lightning, the stroke of midnight, the stroke of a pen.”
― Armistead Maupin, The Night Listener

“Nobody's love ever saved anybody else.”
― Armistead Maupin, The Night Listener

“Semaphore was just right for us, I thought, the perfect metaphor for how we'd managed to coexist all these years. Histrionic but mute, we had signalled our deepest feelings through broad strokes of pantomime, and always at a distance.”
― Armistead Maupin, The Night Listener

“He looks like me, I thought, studying his old face as if he were a newborn in my arms. He had my jawline and jowls, my droopy blue eyes, the same full silky head of hair, only white instead of gray. Here sat my past and my future, my inevitable twin, the face I was melting into with fierce efficiency. God help us, I thought. Someone left the cake out in the rain.”
― Armistead Maupin, The Night Listener

“There are moments, I think, when you actually feel your life changing, when you can all but hear the clumsy clank and bang of fate's machinery.”
― Armistead Maupin, The Night Listener

“I couldn't write—or wouldn't write, at any rate—unable to face the grueling self-scrutiny that fiction demands”
― Armistead Maupin, The Night Listener

“Then they would both dissolve in giggles, bowing in their mirth to the awful hopelessness of it all.”
― Armistead Maupin, The Night Listener