The Great Santini Quotes
"The whole state depressed him, the blue lines representing highways that intersected towns whose names and destinies were mysteries to him."
"When you’re my age you realize you have a finite number of good-byes to say in your life."
"The family that had moved four times in four years, traveling in summer nights, past bleached-out, sun-dried towns, moving along southern highways through the shrill, eternal symphonies of southern insects, humming old tunes and sleeping as the car rolled through the vast wildernesses and untransmissible nights: this family was tied to the image of the automobile; it was the signet of their private mythology."
"The appearance of the weapon caused a stir among his children behind him. It was the first time he had ever openly carried a weapon on a trip."
"They’ve been having quite a lot of trouble with stray dinosaurs and stuff in Georgia lately."
"You learn how to meet people. You learn how to go up to people and make their acquaintance. You know how to act in public. You have excellent manners and it's easy for you to be charming."
"A lady grieves in silence. She always has a smile on the outside. She waits until she is alone to express her sorrow."
"A lady just knows how to talk. It’s not something she is taught. It is something within her, something inherently gentle and refined."
"If a little shit comes into your life, pretend that it’s milk chocolate."
"A Meecham never gives up, never surrenders, never sticks his tail between his legs, never gets weepy, never gets his nose out of joint, and never, never, never, under any circumstance, loses sight of the fact that it is the Meecham family that he represents, whose honor he is upholding."
"This isn’t the good part of town. So there’s no sense yappin’."
"You could find a turd in a scoop of ice cream, Mary Anne."
"I guarantee you we won’t move from these quarters I am about to show you."
"Now, I want you to listen and listen good. We have bivouacked all night and arrived at our destination, one Ravenel, South Carolina, at approximately 0800 hours, twenty minutes before your commanding officer had planned."
"Let’s say a prayer, thanking the Blessed Mother for a safe trip."
"Be proud, Atchley, proud of yourself and proud of the Corps."
"Colonel John J. Jones, I fly around the country testing the readiness of troops for combat and what just happened here is part of my duties."
"You could give me a platoon of Marines and I could make Harlem safe for white people in three days. Give me a squadron and I could turn Havana into a parking lot in a few hours. I’m good and I know I’m good."
"The only advice I’ll give you is to play it low-keyed around Varney."
"There’s never any peaks and valleys for you. Only peaks, and they’re always Himalayan or Alpine."
"A family without ritual and order was a rootless tribe subject to boredom and anarchy."
"You’re getting nervous and fidgety as a treeful of crows."
"I may do something that might be of some small interest to you, Matt. If you don’t get upstairs on the double, I just may stomp your face in."
"Listen up, hogs... You will work cheerfully until your detail is completed to my satisfaction."
"I’m relaxed. What do I got to do, write a book?"
"All the totems of Bull’s disenchantment with the South could be carved from pillars of congealed grits."
"In war games somebody has to be designated as the enemy. When you get older, you’ll get to be Marines."
"Hair is the glory of a woman, but the shame of a soldier."
"I’m a hell of a lot better athlete than you."
"The game was a framework in which there was a winner and a loser."
"You’ve never seen a white boy that can dribble half as good as I can."
"We’ve been living on bases and in cities for so long that I forgot what the South really is."
"Lord, honey, if it moves Arrabelle can cook it. And if it don’t move, she can always throw it in the pot with some greens and hamhock."
"He played Old Maid with Karen and Matt with the same competitiveness as when he battled Japanese pilots in the Pacific."
"His hands were still very fast. He could handle a basketball with remarkable dexterity for one who had abandoned the court so long ago."
"The pilot with the good eyes for spotting enemy troop movements...could also use those eyes for looking up, and for judging the distance between the basket and his hands, for that silent worship of rims."
"The game became rough. Sweat poured down Bull’s face and Ben caught an elbow under the left eye when he tried to block one of Bull’s hook shots."
"Ben kept saying to himself, 'I’ll make him work on defense. I’ll get his legs tired trying to stop me. When his legs go, his shooting will go. He’s out of shape.'"
"During the entire meal Bull read the newspaper. He did not try to begin conversation, for he knew through long experience that whenever these sudden choreographies of violence erupted, he had to endure an exile of silence from his wife and children for an indeterminate period."
"Then he heard his father shooting baskets under the light with the river invisible and boatless beyond the house and only the braided string of lights of houses across the river to mark the far shore."
"If he ever does that to you again, Ben, I’ll leave him. So help me God, I’ll leave him."
"The only time we are on the same side is when we’re at war and when Army plays Navy."
"We are Marines. Marine Corps fighting men. Marine Corps fighter pilots. Marine Corps warriors. Marine Corps killers."
"If you want to suck on some balls, I suggest you buy a pack of marbles because I hate a nut suckin’, ball swingin’, fart sniffin’ bastard worse than I hate all the Russians in the Kremlin."
"One could brim with hidden reservoirs of counterfeit personality, walk up to mobs of inbred teenagers, say the proper things, smile the winning smile, and enter into the mainstream of high school life without experiencing the painful days of walking the school hallways like unearthed troglodytes."
"Each year before the first day of school, Lillian would deliver a buoyant address that was always a variation on a theme."
"In a new school one had to build a set of friends on the abandoned carcasses of unhappy boys and girls who befriended you during the days when you had no choice."
"Ben and Mary Anne paced the halls of Calhoun High together, deriving strength and comfort from each other’s desolation."
"It was obvious to Ben that she was a lot more interested in the politics of homeroom than the muddled breastworks of state and local government."
"No matter how sedulously Ben and Mary Anne prepared for the nightmare, nothing could ameliorate their discomfort at entering a new high school for their annual pilgrimage among strangers."
"Finally Mrs. Troutman began to speak again. 'Now I’ve checked the records and I’ve found to my shock and disappointment that only one boy in this class has the grades to be eligible for homeroom office.'"
"Lillian had provided Ben with an inestimable theory that leapt to his brain as soon as he felt the knife point near his larynx. 'If a southern boy ever pulls a knife on you, Ben, it is because he knows how to use it.'"
"Ben was becoming aware of the voices of satellite greasers moving in and around the perimeter of the fight."
"Bull knew that every town had its Hobie’s, a rallying place for both the withered and the bright pharisees who had a passion for assembly and a genuine need to keep a tab on the why’s and wherefore’s of their town."
"It’s great to be here among the Dead Pecker Club again, listening to all the dead peckers mouth off like they still had a little vinegar left in them."
"You boys are gonna have a hard time getting rid of me."
"Every time I eat grits, it becomes perfectly clear to me why the South lost the war."
"There is no culture or refinement here. That's what I detest about this restaurant."
"Mama thinks you eat like a pig, Daddy. She's just trying to help you develop good table manners."
"A real live pecker here at Hobie's. That's as rare as a good joke on these stools."
"I'm not going to be a Marine! I'm not! I'm not! I'm not!"
"It might behoove this class for me to remind them that the body and blood of Our Lord Jesus Christ is on our tongues when the priest gives us the host."
"The next time you have a headache, think about having a nail driven through your foot."
"I thought I knew about love and the boundaries of love until I raised you these past eighteen years. I knew nothing about love. That has been your gift to me."
"Decide what you want from life then let nothing deter you from getting it."
"The Marine Corps takes a small ego and makes it gigantic; it takes a large ego and then steps back to see how large it can grow."
"It can take a stupid, spineless man and make him feel like he could face the armies of God and stand a fifty-fifty chance of winning."
"Every time your father goes up in a plane, there’s a chance he won’t come back."
"The only men you really know are pilots. I don’t think you’ll make the Marine Corps a career, but I think a couple of years will do you some good."
"Gentleness is the quality I have admired the most in men."
"Keep your faith in God, your humility, and your sense of humor."
"The best source of information in the entire Corps is in the middle of an ‘O’ wives meeting."
"I wouldn’t trust Helen Keller. Even if you lopped her arms off."
"A fighter pilot isn't supposed to feel things. He's supposed to kill people."
"Sometimes I play the ogre just to make you mad."
"In every war someone gets fried. The Jews got it from the Krauts. In war, there ain't no morals. There are just winners, losers, and those that got their asses fried sunny side up."
"Death in battle was the one poetry that almost released tears in Bull Meecham."
"I've got to win some medals if I'm going to make bird colonel. This could make or break my career."
"You and the other split-tails can do all the feeling you want to, but I can't. I have a mission to do. Period."
"I want the boys to become good soldiers and the girls to be fine pieces of tail for their husbands."
"It would bother me if they weren't afraid of me. It's my job to see that they stay afraid of me."
"Sometimes when you talk I wonder how two people so different could be married so long."
"Any boy who came to him had moments of feeling like a king."
"It was the boy who had missed the layup on the first day of practice. All along the street, in the privacy of lightless automobiles, beneath the gaze of fathers there was a suffering that would be brief, but one that, at this moment, in this place, was all but unendurable."
"If they make mistakes, Lord, blow the whistle because you’re the great referee. Call time out and bring them to center court for another jump ball. Don’t let them go out of bounds, Lord."
"We desert the coaches of Little League, Ben thought, leaving the river’s edge and returning to the sidewalk beneath the huge water oaks of River Street."
"The cheerleaders bounced, sashayed, strutted, preened, and generally acted as if they had died and gone to heaven."
"Fantasy crackled like electricity along the back wall."
"What kind of world is it, Ben thought, that lets its coaches die without his boys around him, buying him Cokes, calling him by his first name, and rubbing his shoulder with Atomic Balm?"
"In the faces of the boys in uniform, they could see their faces. When a jump shot split cleanly through the net, it was their hand, their phantom hand, that guided the ball."
"Plays and moves, embedded in him, poured out of him."
"It was life reduced to a set of rules, an existential life, a life clarified by the eyes of fathers."
"Every pore was open to the action swirling around him, every vibration, every stirring, every cheer, every carnivorous roar."
"This sport in all its absurdity did a special thing for Ben Meecham: it made him happy."
"I reckon you just think you are plain wonderful, don’t you, animule?"
"It is because my students love me that I can remain in this bleak town teaching the King’s English."
"Be attuned to your environment. Know what is going on about you. Make yourself aware."
"Your bodies are the temples of the Holy Ghost."
"Now most of you probably think that nuns all have faces that can stop clocks and have no sexual urges at all. This is not true. All human beings have sexual drives because all human beings are animals."
"Their reward will come later and will be far greater because of their sacrifice. Their place in heaven will be higher than those who yielded to the temptations and petty cravings of the flesh."