Quote collection
357 quotes — follow a thought to its full quote page.
"I remember in grammar school the teacher asked if anyone had any hobbies. I was the only one with any hobbies and I had every hobby there was... name anything, no matter how esoteric. I could have given everyone a hobby and still had 40 or 50 to take home."
"So everything is necessary. Every least thing. This is the hard lesson. Nothing can be dispensed with. Nothing despised. Because the seams are hid from us, you see. The joinery. The way in which the world is made. We have no way to know what could be taken away. What omitted. We have no way to tell what might stand and what might fall."
"People apparently only read mystery stories of any length. With mysteries, the longer the better, and people will read any damn thing. But the indulgent, 800-page books that were written a hundred years ago are just not going to be written anymore, and people need to get used to that."
"They sat on a bench and Sproule held his wounded arm to his chest and rocked back and forth and blinked in the sun. What do you want to do? said the kid. Get a drink of water. Other than that. I dont know. You want to try and head back? To Texas? I don't know where else. We'd never make it. Well you say. I aint got no say. He was coughing again. He held his chest with his good hand and sat as if he'd get his breath. What have you got, a cold? I got consumption. Consumption? He nodded. I come out here for my health."
"I've always been interested in the Southwest. There isn't a place in the world you can go where they don't know about cowboys and Indians and the myth of the West."
"I guess you ought to be careful about cussin the dead. I would say at the least there probably ain't no luck in it."
"War is the ultimate game because war is at last a forcing of the unity of existence. War is god."
"When the lies are all told and forgot the truth will be their yet."
"Pain for the old was no longer a surprise."
"To have a child when you're older, it wrenches you up out of your nap and makes you look at things, you know, afresh. It forces the world on you. And I think it's a good thing."
"It had ceased raining in the night and he walked out on the road and called for the dog. He called and called. Standing in that inexplicable darkness. Where there was no sound anywhere save only the wind. After a while he sat in the road. He took off his hat and placed it on the tarmac before him and he bowed his head and held his face in his hands and wept. He sat there for a long time and after a while the east did gray and after a while the right and godmade sun did rise, once again, for all and without distinction."
"I guess if everybody went crazy together nobody would notice."
"When God made man the devil was at his elbow. A creature that can do anything. Make a machine. And a machine to make the machine. And evil that can run itself a thousand years, no need to tend it."
"Years later he'd stood in the charred ruins of a library where blackened books lay in pools of water. Shelves tipped over. Some rage at the lies arranged in their thousands row on row. He picked up one of the books and thumbed through the heavy bloated pages. He'd not have thought the value of the smallest thing predicated on a world to come. It surprised him. That the space which these things occupied was itself an expectation."
"On this road there are no godspoke men. They are gone and I am left and they have taken with them the world."
"Can you do it? When the time comes? When the time comes there will be no time. Now is the time. Curse God and die."
"And the dreams so rich in color. How else would death call you? Waking in the cold dawn it all turned to ash instantly. Like certain ancient frescoes entombed for centuries suddenly exposed to the day."
"When we're all gone at last then there'll be nobody here but death and his days will be numbered too. He'll be out in the road there with nothing to do and nobody to do it to. He'll say: where did everybody go? And that's how it will be. What's wrong with that?"
"If you dont respect me what must you think of yourself?"
"If a man's at odds to know his own mind it's because he hasn't got aught but his mind to know it with."