The Financial Lives Of The Poets Quotes
"I’m just the middle-aged guy who leaves my gunmetal sedan running when I come in after midnight. When I can’t sleep. And I’ve forgotten to get milk at a regular store."
"For years, recent immigrants like Rahjiv have been a political Rorschach: see turban, think terrorist and you’re a Red ’Merican."
"Rahjiv may have jockeyed a 7/11 in India too for all we know—so impeccable is he with change, effortlessly plastic-bagging Hostess Sno Balls and Little Debbies."
"Whenever I come in here, I invariably think of my own boys, at home asleep in their beds, still a few years from such trouble."
"Two tattooed white kids in silk sweat suits step to the line behind me and I tense a little, double-pat my wallet."
"The milk is like nine dollars a gallon."
"The clouds are low, like a drop ceiling suffused with light from the city. They slide silently overhead."
"I read once that we can only fear what we’re already afraid of; that our deepest fears are the memory of some earlier, unbearable fear."
"My only question is: when did Moms start wearing them?"
"In the same way one might try to piece together a fading dream in the morning, I’ll try to re-create the stupid chain of events that caused me to quit a solid newspaper job two years ago."
"Sir, I admit your general rule, That every poet is a fool, But you yourself may serve to show it, That every fool is not a poet."
"It’s like prohibition. In hard times, people crave the old stuff. Pot is nostalgia for a lot of people our age. Selling weed is like opening a speakeasy in 1933."
"The only emperor is the emperor of ice-cream."
"One need not be a chamber to be haunted, One need not be a house."
"We’re all just renting. And this is how the poets failed us."
"I can’t believe it. You are seriously thinking of dealing weed."
"In Monte’s fields the sweet weed grows / On a basement farm where row by row / Water courses through plastic tubes / Feeding unlikely dreams of rescue."
"How much capital does a consortium need / (I’ve got four hundred in the bank) / To buy four million dollars in weed?"
"I however, think of Mother Teresa, who at the end of her life / admitted she’d had a crisis and had stopped hearing God’s voice / decades earlier, which had to be a bit of a relief, I’d think."
"This problem is endemic to the faulty machine it exposed / and contrary to the news, it wasn’t caused by poor people / being allowed to borrow one hundred percent / of inflated home prices with nothing down, not really."
"There is a low hum of space heaters in Lumberland, as all around us men are gathering the materials to build things; it’s what we do at Lumberland. We come get stuff to build stuff. In this way, over time, men like us built all the stuff in the world."
"I’m sorry. I said it’s the easiest, not the cheapest."
"Monte stands while he types at a plastic-covered computer. This seems unfair to me. I had really hoped to tower above him."
"It’s not that I’ve caught up on my sleep—other than the thirty-minute nap in Drug Dealer Dave’s car and a quick hour this morning, I haven’t really had any. It just feels as if there has been a slight turn in events, a gentle shift in my direction."
"Who gets to buy a potential two-million-dollar-a-year business for four million? You think Jack Welch wouldn’t jump at this? Or Warren Buffett?"
"It’s as if the whole country believes we’ve done something to deserve this collapse, this global warming and endless war, this pile of shit we’re in. We’ve lived beyond our means, spent the future, sapped resources, lived on the bubble."
"I wouldn’t mind talking to that old clear-eyed Sears tie-and-coverall father of mine again. Or better, I wish I was five again, that he’d take my little hand and pull me up on his lap."
"Maybe the Catholics have a big sin Dumpster outside the Vatican."
"What if you could take all of your trouble, put it in a file folder and throw it away?"
"Believing something has shifted, that the world can be benign. No, this is what it means to come apart—not gently unraveling, but blowing out, a tire on the freeway."
"And the most remarkable thing in a remarkable day—that, in that vast gut of his, Monte apparently has nothing but stomach acid, because he heaves and heaves, but nothing comes out except bile and an acrid smell."
"Godzillas and limericks and What-kind-of-man—and all that’s left is fear, more fear than I thought was possible—like a heightened version of the terror you feel during a rough landing on a jet."
"Maybe we all forget everything the minute we learn it. I don’t know."
"These kids at this party were born in egg cartons, have spent their lives in egg cartons…and I’m fooling myself if I think it’s any different in my bigger egg carton."
"A federal fucking task force? Do you know what that means?"
"I should’ve let Monte board this place up, but Jamie comes up with the idea of selling this place and I just thought…yeah, if I could make a little money before I got disbarred…I could go back to school."
"Jesus, Slippers. How does everything get so fucked up?"
"I think about all of those foreclosures out there: an empty house is an abomination."
"Sometimes you just make the best of your mistakes."
"It strikes me that I am at least two years late in building my boys their treeless tree fort."
"Christ. It is the only unforgivable thing, really…to feel sorry for yourself."
"We’re like children after a thunderstorm. It’s okay, I whisper to Lisa on those nights that I convince her to stay with me. It’s okay. Just keep moving forward. Don’t look back. It’s okay."