The Kingdom of Sand Quotes

“One of the great appeals of Florida has always been the sense that the minute you get here you have permission to collapse.”
― Andrew Holleran, The Kingdom of Sand

“I see in the distance on streets I don’t usually take, merely because I can see the glow of blue and green lights, the two most satisfying Christmas colors, no doubt because they are so melancholy.”
― Andrew Holleran, The Kingdom of Sand

“I’d met him sitting in his car outside a men’s room at the boat ramp in a town in North Central Florida. But at least once, in London, love and sex had been combined in the same person—love, sex, art, and freedom.”
― Andrew Holleran, The Kingdom of Sand

“I never knew how he was going to depress me next.”
― Andrew Holleran, The Kingdom of Sand

“a habit he’d developed when going to dirty movie theaters in South Florida, something he did not want to give up even in old age,”
― Andrew Holleran, The Kingdom of Sand

“he was sixty-two,”
― Andrew Holleran, The Kingdom of Sand

“When I got home, the neighborhood would be so quiet that after a few weeks in other places, I'd want to yell at all the silent houses I drove past: What are you doing in there? Eating, shitting, watching TV—writing novels?”
― Andrew Holleran, The Kingdom of Sand

“When the American novelist Howard Sturgis lay on his deathbed he was cared for so solicitously by his life partner that at one point Sturgis had to remind him, "A watched pot never boils"—surely one of the wittiest comments ever made while dying, unless you consider what the socialite Drue Heinz said when nearing the end—"They won't even let you take a book"—or the emperor Vespasian, who remarked on his deathbed, "I think I am turning into a god.”
― Andrew Holleran, The Kingdom of Sand

“In novels—at least in nineteenth-century novels—people lock up houses, go away, travel for years, and then return. There's something romantic about the way the manor is shut up, so that the protagonists can wander through the Far East and come home several years later, because their house, like some ancient tree, will always be there, the roof covered with leaves the oaks are shedding in the autumn sunlight. The servants rush out to greet them; the hero hears that the woman he loves is still unmarried; the plot resumes.”
― Andrew Holleran, The Kingdom of Sand

“Leaving Florida, nevertheless, I always felt regret; though when I found myself back in New York my mother's voice on the telephone seemed so shrunken and small, I vowed that I would never waste time in that town again. How could I? I was not responsible for her happiness; she wanted me to live, and life was wasted every day I was there. Look how the noiseless spider, the relentless metronome, the secret thief, had staked their claim on even these two people, these once glamorous parents who had turned into a pair of country mice.”
― Andrew Holleran, The Kingdom of Sand

“Florida was where they lived, where I kept coming back, though nobody asked me questions anymore about what I was doing. One day, when I was sitting in the back seat of the car as we were waiting for a railroad train to go by on our way to the mall, my mother turned back to me and said, apropos of something I forget, "You are a separate person, you know," but I felt I wasn't. I couldn't get away from them, which is why I kept coming back to Florida.”
― Andrew Holleran, The Kingdom of Sand

“The boredom of the place had made of my mother such a devotee of television that I knew she would not come out to greet me if my arrival coincided with a dramatic moment on Donahue.”
― Andrew Holleran, The Kingdom of Sand

“Earl used pesticides with abandon and treated his yard with such brutality I could not see how he could be homosexual”
― Andrew Holleran, The Kingdom of Sand

“It is a fact seldom observed that after a certain age a single man is a creature no one has a place for”
― Andrew Holleran, The Kingdom of Sand