The Bazaar Of Bad Dreams Quotes
"If you broke down, your choices were two: fix it yourself or wait for some good Samaritan to stop and give you a lift to the nearest garage."
"Good Samaritans are everywhere, especially in the boondocks. People who live in the boonies take care of their own."
"Back then I was dropping acid regularly, and I lost all sorts of stuff. Including, for short periods, my mind."
"That turnpike oasis may be gone—as are the old Ford wagon, my old girlfriend, and many of my old bad habits—but the story remains. It’s one of my favorites."
"You can’t come," his older brother said. "It’s too dangerous."
"Hang out with who?" Pete asked. "I even brought my magnifying glass."
"You’ll probably break your spine and be fuckin paralyzed for life."
"Okay, chickenshit!" Normie yelled. "Seeya later, masturbator!"
"It’s one of those jokes that isn’t quite a joke."
"She could qualify for jet fighter training," he told Johnny and Carla.
"Stylistic copying eventually wanes. Little by little, writers develop their own styles, each as unique as a fingerprint."
"The humor here is black, but in my opinion, that’s often the best kind."
"When they argue they’re like greyhounds chasing the mechanical rabbit. You go past the same scenery time after time, but you don’t see the landscape. You see the rabbit."
"It’s too bad I lost it. My father gave it to me back when he was still right in the head."
"I might have lost it. Or had it stoled. That might have happened, too."
"Life’s a sucker in the throat, life’s the gorge we all fall in, it’s a soup and we all end up vegetables."
"Life’s a dirty place with no religion in it."
"There’s more to life than this; there are maps inside your maps."
"That realization raised questions of morality that still engage me to this day. It’s a rubbery concept, isn’t it? Uniquely stretchable. But if you stretch anything too far, it will tear. Nowadays I give my blood instead of selling it, but it occurred to me then and still seems true to me now: under the right circumstances, anyone might sell anything."
"Morality, like art, means drawing a line someplace."
"You’re home early. Don’t tell me Winnie died."
"I’m not claiming I’m without sin. Not at all. Those who can say (and I suppose there are a few) that they have never sinned in deed or word can hardly say they’ve never sinned in thought, can they?"
"If you continue the way you are, dear, you’ll need a marriage counselor, at the very least."
"I wouldn’t have to really hurt the person to get the money? I want to be very clear about that."
"The hour of conspiracy if there ever was one, she thought."
"It’s a moot question, Nor. We’ve decided. You play Sarah Palin and tell him thanks but no thanks for that bridge to nowhere. I’ll find a way to finish the book without his weird idea of a grant-in-aid."
"It’s myself I don’t trust. Go to sleep, Chad. This subject is closed."
"I only ask," he said, "because the second time you ran the tape, I watched you instead of it."
"Two hundred thousand in cash is what I’m offering. Enough to pay off all the outstanding bills, enough to enable your husband to finish his book—enough, perhaps, to start a new life in Vermont."
"You better have. You better have. The time I haven’t been pacing around, I’ve been on the toilet. I keep having cramps—"
"You can download books from thin air, and you can make the type as big as you want."
"Books aren’t solely ideas. Books have a smell, for instance. One that gets better—more nostalgic—as the years go by."
"Living well isn’t the best revenge; loving well is."
"It’s my own ur. Something simple and primitive deep inside, telling me not to push that button."
"A man’s life was five dogs long, Cortland believed."
"Poor impulse control is ninety percent of your problem."
"The experimental program you foolishly accessed can see clearly six months into the future."
"Only through fiction can we think about the unthinkable, and perhaps obtain some sort of closure."
"Do you want to do swapsies? Like in the old days?"
"I’ve been having this bad dream for a week now."
"You don’t have to be a sailor to love the novels of Patrick O’Brian."
"Baseball humor is not what you’d call sophisticated."
"Baseball’s a tender game, you know; people don’t realize. And it isn’t only catchers who get hurt in collisions at the plate."
"He wasn’t wearing his special button," said Indian Scontras. "Tommy was proud. He was a very proud queer."
"I hate the assumption that you can’t write about something because you haven’t experienced it, and not just because it assumes a limit on the human imagination, which is basically limitless."
"Life’s a great thing, but if you live long enough, it wears out before it runs out."
"What I wanted to write about was the brute power of the human sex drive. That power, it seems to me, holds sway over those of every orientation, especially when young."
"All I know is I saw it in the first game you played for us, and somebody got hurt."
"In that way—there are others, I’m sure, many others—gay men and straight men are the same."
"How many human beings on earth can claim that? A dozen? Maybe only six?"
"Like all the stories in this book, its principal purpose is to entertain."
"Actually," Newsome said, "I caused the accident. Not so tight, Kat, please."
"Your real job as journalists, he told his classes, is to give people the facts that allow them to make decisions and go forward. So don’t be fancy. Don’t go all twee and hifalutin. Start at the start, lay the middle out neatly, so the facts of each event lead logically to the next, and end at the end."
"If I Bury the Living was remade, it would carry its hair-raising premise right through to the end."
"Jack Briggs, noted for his horrific performance in last year’s Holy Rollers as a talking bookshelf in love with Jennifer Lawrence, was found dead in his hotel room surrounded by some of his favorite powdered treats."
""Not on my watch, we’re not. And don’t call me Jerri. You know better than that.""
""In New York, paranoia is a survival skill. But it’s no reason to quit what could become a far more lucrative job in the immediate future. Even you must know that a freaky coincidence—and I admit this one’s fairly freaky—is just a coincidence. Mike, I need you to stay on board.""
"It’s over. Don’t even think about it next year, you poor-ass Yankees."
"I remember how quiet it was. The frogs hadn’t started up again yet, and the poor old loons had packed it in for the night, maybe for the rest of the summer."
"The wind was pushin that flyin saucer east’rds across the lake, toward Twelve Pines."
"Well, you know how their place got its name, and them dozen pines was plenty dry."
"The spaceship tore in two pieces. Half of it fell on the lawn, which wasn’t s’bad, but the other half floated down on the main roof, still shootin off a few final rockets."
"It was the music the spaceship makes in Close Encounters of the Third Kind."
"The fish will live a little longer, but eventually they’ll be gone, too."