Geek Love Quotes
"Don't you get dreams? Don't you get scared reading those at night? They're supposed to scare you."
"We are the things that come to the norms in nightmares. The thing that lurks in the bell tower and bites out the throats of the choirboys -- that's you, Oly."
"He was in one of his toilet phases at that time. 'Sweet rosy-brown arsehole' was his expression of pleasure. 'Shitsucker' was the pejorative."
"Papa would tell us about the hard times and explain that Arty had brought success to the show, and that Elly and Iphy had helped the business and, because he was a kind man, that even Oly had 'done her part.'"
"The thing in the closet that makes the babies scream in the dark before it sucks their last breath -- that's me."
"I've wished I had two heads. Or that I was invisible. I've wished for a fish's tail instead of legs. I've wished to be more special."
"It's hard to explain. Maybe I don't even understand it yet. My one prayer was that I'd wake up and my tail would be gone. My backside would be smooth like the others."
"How many big women use the side door of the Glass House? I could be tagging lumpily after a convincing middle-aged transvestite."
"He'd be rehearsing the story already, to tell his wife over chicken and biscuits in the kitchen, as he sat with his sleeves still damp from scrubbing and his hat off showing the pale stretch below his hair where the sunburn ended."
"Nobody carries more cash than they can afford to lose."
"A carnival in daylight is an unfinished beast, anyway. Rain makes it a ghost."
"If Papa had discovered fire, he'd think it was for sticking in your mouth to amaze a crowd."
"The beauty of it is being so totally inconspicuous."
"We're lucky, you know, that Papa has such a small-potato brain."
"If he'd discovered America, he would have gone home and forgot about it, because it didn't have any hot-dog stands."
"I can practice my hate thoughts on the norms in the midway, too."
"Sometimes when I felt the eyes crawling on me from all sides, I got scared thinking someone was looking who wasn't just curious."
"For obvious reasons 'show-off' was no insult in our family, but Arty had a way of turning 'sweetheart' into a thumb in the eye."
"The huge buoyant air sack of love that filled his body had just exploded and the collapse was devastating."
"The dumb little fuck was supposed to be so goddamn sensitive, how come he couldn't figure it out?"
"How deep and sticky is the darkness of childhood, how rigid the blades of infant evil."
"Grownups can deal with scraped knees, dropped ice-cream cones, and lost dollies, but if they suspected the real reasons we cry they would fling us out of their arms in horrified revulsion."
"Hope is a good feeling that needs risk to work."
"We survive until, by sheer stamina, we escape into the dim innocence of our own adulthood and its forgetfulness."
"I'm just the plumbing that lets it flow through."
"All he had to do to make me like him was need me."
"It is bitter for the young to see what awful innocence adults grow into, that terrible vulnerability that must be sheltered from the rodent mire of childhood."
"You girls look a bit better now. Less like a demon crew and more like hungover angels."
"Wondering where, by the shriveled scrotum of Saint Elmo, you'd all been blown to."
"If I had got you out like Mama wanted, you would all have been home like me and Arty."
"It's my piece of the birthday cake. They like it."
"I'll tell you if you'll tell me about Chick and Doc P."
"What if we can have a baby? Don't you ever think about what's going to happen when we grow up?"
"Stupid! What do you suppose is going to happen when Mama and Papa die?"
"People always assume I'm a lesbian. I'm not. I have no sex at all that I know of."
"She thinks she's adopted me, that she's doing me a kindness."
"It would have been a snap to get close to her if she were a horticulture type or a dog breeder."
"I try to balance the glass in my free hand but the whiskey sloshes out over the rim and chills my knees where it falls."
"Knowing Miss Lick has made me think about Arty again."
"My name is Alma Witherspoon and I just want to take one minute to tell you all about a wonderful thing that happened to me ..."
"Those who had been waiting finally found a place to go."
"It was Alma 'Pen Pal' Witherspoon who actually founded what came to be known as 'Arturism' or the 'Arturan Cult.'"
"She originated the concept of 'Artier than Thou.'"
"The thing grew. Arty's fans -- or the 'Admitted,' as Alma insisted on calling them -- began to trail after the show in cars and vans and trailers of their own."
"The occasional television crews, doing thirty-second 'Day at the Carnival' bits for the evening news, took a while to tumble to what was going on in the center tent."
"From the notes of Norval Sanderson: '... Suspected earlier that Arturo was being manipulated by someone, probably the father, Al Binewski. I saw Arty as a tool for some functional 'norm' who was raking in the cash from the dowries.'"
"Arty's growing flock, however, was different. I dreamed one night that Arty cried them into the world."
"Arty is sporadically self-educated with wide lacunae in his information."
"We create a leader by locating one in the crowd who is standing up."
"Conscious decision making is a requisite for progress."
"For what I've got to say, the more exposure the folks have to the outside world, the better."
"I don't need tricks and traps and brainwashing because I'm giving the poor sorry sons-abitches what they crave more than air."
"We protect children because they have not yet proven themselves to be hamstrung shit-holes."
"I want people who know what life has to offer and choose to turn their backs on it."
"No one but Arty himself and I were to know that the Bag Man was the shootist from that long-ago parking-lot incident."
"I wish he hadn't knocked. I could have done it if he'd just opened the door without knocking."
"They make stuff up, crazy stuff, so I'll seem special too."
"It's interesting that when these individuals choose -- and it is their choice always -- to endure voluntary amputations for their own personal benefit, society professes itself shocked and disapproving."
"You'd think dwarfs and midgets would have drifted through the Fabulon all my life."
"Mama often said that fat folks went out of style because every tenth ass on the street now was wider than the one in the tent."
"It goes in streaks. But some things never go out of fashion."
"It so happened that the Pin Kid who had joined up with our current pack of swallowers was a hunchback."
"He was fragile as a glass swan, fine-skinned with freckles, brown eyes, and a clear, honest face."
"Mama and Papa can't deal with it. All the guards, all the simps, the Arturans, the show folks, even Horst -- they could turn in a flash."
"I wanted to cram her back inside where she'd be safe. I was too weak to protect her."
"I was full-grown before I ever set foot in a house without wheels."
"My father and mother designed me this way. They achieved greater originality in some of their other projects."
"It's all very well to read about houses, and see houses from the road, and to tell yourself, That's where folks live. But it's another thing entirely to walk inside and stand there."
"The birds of the air have their nests, the foxes of the ground have their holes. But the son of man hath nowhere to rest his head."
"I have never claimed that my hump is extraordinary in size or conformation, but it is a classic of its kind."
"This mystery appeared when I first stood in a rooted house. I hadn't understood before that anything about me needed explaining."
"If I shoot some sonofabitch I'm not gonna miss, ya know."
"I suddenly knew I would die-end completely. And the real tragedy was that all the wonders I'd seen and smelt and felt would die with me."
"I was thirty-eight years old before I ever felt the burn of whiskey on my lip. But I knew it right away for what it was."
"We're a tribe of storytellers and jokers. No family meal was complete unless one of us managed to deliver a punch line just as a sibling took a mouthful of milk so the laugh could spray the table."
"I saw myself at a fork in the road, where my choices were a life of petty and extremely unglamorous crime, or getting my shit together in a major way."