Tom Lake Quotes
"Sometimes that’s where the diamonds are."
"‘All the world’s a stage,’ and all the men and women merely want to be players."
"None of the books I’d read were as important as this, none of the math tests or history papers had taught me how to act, and by 'act' I don’t mean on a stage, I mean in life."
"Every Stage Manager came with an unintended lesson: clarity, intention, simplicity."
"Decency, a word I used to cover any aspect of being a good person, factored heavily into my thinking about the future."
"It’s like being able to sing one song perfectly. It’s a great trick, but it’s only going to get you so far."
"This unremarkable room with the remarkable view in Middle-of-Nowhere, Michigan, was everything that had ever been written about freedom and possibility."
"We all have a blind spot, right? That bit of incorrect information from childhood that mysteriously never gets updated."
"It is sentimental and useless to tell someone you would gladly give them your past because the past is nontransferable, and anyway, I would have wanted to give her only the good days."
"What you need to remember is that everything’s a fix."
"We sit and watch Benny fly away, our heads still full of movies."
"The collective desire of every person in that theater was for the play to succeed."
"Uncle Wallace never had to reach for a line because the lines were written inside him."
"Maybe that’s all that needs to be said about Duke: he was forever the first one in."
"The blue sky was her backdrop and the sunlight was her lighting; it caught the gold hoops in her ears."
"Dancing and singing is all about working your ass off so that people think you just roll."
"Being your understudy is teaching me things."
"Sally Bowles, her leg slung shamelessly over the back of a chair, extended an invitation to the cabaret that no one could refuse."
"I wanted to climb up on one of the Kit Kat chairs, to be a woman rather than a girl."
"So you want me to tell you about Duke without mentioning that he was crazy?"
"The planet is fucked. There’s nothing I can do about that."
"If anybody ever wonders what I’m here for, that’s it."
"The sky was clear. The rain had given up and gone to Canada."
"Five generations of Nelsons had lived on this farm. Surely the sixth generation would live here as well."
"People told me later how well I had handled the situation but I remembered it with nothing but shame."
"You can't save them that won't save themselves."
Drinking is a muscle," Duke liked to say. "And you have to keep that muscle in shape.
"I want to have a thought, an action, a memory that I haven’t run past anyone."
"In the summer the pear trees were fine. In the summer, all that is hideous about a pear tree is hidden by leaves and pears."
"I want them to think I was better than I was, and I want to tell them the truth in case the truth will be useful."
"The excitement in his voice when he talked about this kid was moving to me."
"The past broke away. All the things I’d thought about myself before—I am an actress, I am not an actress, I was in love, I was betrayed—disintegrated into nothing."
"She meant for me to do something with my life, the kinds of things she hadn’t been able to do herself."
"I liked being pregnant. I was good at it."
"The enormous black SUV with black-tinted windows idling in front of the house called to mind drug lords, federal agents, movie stars."
"He had a very nice smile for children, a completely different smile from the one that was familiar to me."
"The truth is I’ve never been one hundred percent positive who your father was and now I am."
"I could not say I was glad. He seemed to understand this."
"I’m Happy, but only compared to the other six."
"You’re very beautiful, cricket, and by that I don’t just mean you’re pretty, which you are."
"There’s something about the place. I seem to sponge up everyone’s desire for alcohol and carry it with me out the door."