The Neon Rain Quotes
"The evening sky was streaked with purple, the color of torn plums."
"I ax my bossman, Bossman, tell me what's right. He whupped my left, said, Boy, now you know what's right."
"She just a little colored jellyroll for white mens, then they throw her away."
"Little girl that still eat cush-cush gonna outsmart the white mens, her."
"I swear, Dave, I think your feelings are going to be hurt unless you find out the greasers got the hots for you."
"I didn't bring any money. They wouldn't renew it. Something about exceeding my credit limit by four hundred dollars."
"Maybe I saved your life, and you criticize my driving."
"See, don't argue with design and things will work out all right after all, I told myself."
"I think they'll be more worried about explaining themselves to the man they work for."
"Do you like horse racing?" I said. "I've never been."
"We're talking about a very low class of people, Lieutenant."
"We've got a whole grab bag of door prizes for you, Julio."
"What happens outside of us doesn't count. It's what we do with it, the way that we react to it, that's important."
"You're a big winner tonight, Lieutenant. But let the experience work for you."
"It's almost biblical. Eventually somebody eats your lunch, and it always comes from a place you didn't expect it."
"Not here. You're too hot, Lieutenant. In fact, almost on fire."
"No, you're a bright guy with stainless steel balls, evidently."
"If the shit's burning on the stove, I suspect it's yours."
"You have to have faith in what I tell you, Lieutenant."
"Somebody who looks like Howdy Doody has got to be a straight shooter."
"You not only look like a kid, you're as subtle as a shithouse, aren't you?"
"Let's talk about the three guys who gave you gargling lessons in the bathtub last night."
"I get a little emotional on certain subjects. You'll have to excuse me."
"Fuck off, man. I'm going to give you the scam and you can work out your own options."
"I'm surrounded by indifferent people and I don't need any more of them."
"You're damn lucky they didn't blow out your light last night."
"You want it straight, Lieutenant? We've got some firemen and pyromaniacs on the same side of the street."
"Our government is into some real bullshit down there, buddy."
"I didn't write this script. You got into it on your own."
"I called Annie from the pay phone to try to save part of the evening, but no one was home."
"I made a quiet resolution about accepting invitations from federal employees."
"I don't think you've paid enough dues to be telling people to shut up."
"I once again wanted to fill my mind with spiders and crawling slugs and snakes."
"You must have a strong constitution. They shot you up with enough Thorazine to knock out a dinosaur."
"It takes a special kind of degenerate to torture a defenseless man."
"Would you like to live in a communist country, Lieutenant?"
"No matter what you think about me, I'm not some kind of geek for the mob that hops around in the pan like a piece of popcorn. I got a family, my kids go to Sunday school, I pay a lot of taxes."
"Each time you have contact with a government agency, it creates a piece of paper on you. There's people that's got whole rooms of paper on their lives."
"If everybody agrees upon it, it's got to be wrong."
"Rather than the eagle, the crawfish should be the symbol of the United States."
"When you've hunted through the whole marsh for the bull 'gator that ate your hog and you come up empty, go back where you started and commence again. You walked right over him."
"The great nemesis of the gambler is that he's never satisfied with just winning the daily double; he'll reinvest his winnings in every race remaining that afternoon, and if he's still ahead when the window closes on the last race, he'll be at the dog track that night and stay with it until he loses everything."
"Loving somebody is being there when nobody else is. When it's not even a choice."
"You deal with the action on your own terms, whether it's a UFO or a bunch of government buttholes."
"The best way to end a conversation is to tell somebody she can't understand something."
"It's funny how that can be trained into a guy, isn't it?"
"A truly big mess out there. Another hour or so and I don't think there would have been anything left of Bobby Joe except his belt buckle and his boot nails."
"Dear God, my higher power, even though I've abandoned You, don't abandon me."
"I don't know much about alcohol and drinking problems, Dave. Do you want to stop for a beer? I don't mind. Isn't it better to taper off sometimes?"
"Today is Saturday, and it's Saturday all day long, and I don't care about what happened yesterday, at least not about the bad things."
"Everybody thinks I let those seven guys die in that elevator to save my own buns. I was responsible, all right, but not because I was afraid. I didn't have the key to the chain."
"I never saw an American atrocity, at least not a deliberate one, so I did not have those kinds of memories from the war."
"There is no mystery to the self; we are what we do and where we have been. So we have to resurrect the past constantly, erect monuments to it, and keep it alive in order to remember who we are."
"His eyes had the muddy, stupid glaze of someone who believed that the honest expression of his ignorance was an acceptable explanation to those who had the power to make judgments."
"We use them. They use us. It keeps everybody in business."
"If you don't need more of me, I'll go. Sunday is a bad day to be with this type of man. I've smelled that odor before. It comes out of a great cruelty."
"Even a policeman should not look into the darkness of this man's soul."
"The last time you talked to me like this, I was in a hospital bed. Don't take too much for granted."
"I've got the man that helped kill a federal agent," I said. "He can clear me, and I'm bringing him in."
"Your trouble is you been making love to your fist so long you think you're the only guy around here with any integrity."
"You pull on dat 'gator's tail, he gonna clean your kneecaps, him."
"The day these people don't want to gamble and drink, we'll both be out of jobs. In the meantime, go with the flow, bro."
"Maybe the deeper problem was that the Didi Gees of the world understood us, but we did not understand them."
"The road to Roncevaux lures the poet and the visionary like a drug, but the soldier pays for the real estate."
"An old armadillo is old because he's smart, and he doesn't leave his hole unless you give him an acceptable reason."
"Come on, you've got to prove you have cojones. Big boys wear them on the outside of their pants."
"What good is life if you're not willing to risk it?"
"Nobody cares about these things. Oh, they say they do. But they really don't, and I think you know it."
"The only thing that counts is that you're still on top of the ground, sucking air."
"Any problems I have with you are problems I want."
"Scared money never wins. You don't ease up on the batter in the ninth, you don't give up the rail on the far turn."
"Real honor means you're still intact and functioning after your soul's been shot out of a cannon."
"If we break promises to God, shouldn't we be allowed an occasional violation of our word to our friends and superiors?"
"He loosed the souls from their bodies, the grief and terror from their eyes; he unstuck them from their mortal fastenings, sawed the sky loose from the earth's rim, eased them as a lover might into the wheeling of the stars."
"Reason is a word I always associated with bureaucrats, paper shufflers, and people who formed committees that were never intended to solve anything."
"I wondered if he wouldn't have made a better cop than I, except that he didn't like rules, authority, and people who took themselves seriously."
"For some reason every day in New Orleans seems like a holiday, even when you have to work, and there is no better way to enjoy it than rattling down the esplanade in a breezy streetcar that has been running on those same tracks since the turn of the century."
"It was the Louisiana I had grown up in, a place that never seemed to change, where it was never a treason to go with the cycle of things and let the season have its way."
"Vindication is of value only if you're interested in keeping score. I think by that time I had learned that the score takes care of itself."