Sabbath's Theater Quotes
"If you watch the nuts and bulbs, the business works for you. If you don’t watch, and go out and talk with the guests all the time, you are losing money."
"You have to think like that computer thinks, and most of my staff don’t even think like a human being yet."
"The pleasure she found in watching them jerk off! And the pleasure she then took in telling all she’d learned about lust and what it is for men."
"There is nothing that can take away even a little of this misery. It's impossible to believe. One minute here, the next minute not."
"How could I abandon myself to this man who loves me? When he penetrated me, lying on top of me, Matija was moaning louder than I ever recollect."
"What I enjoyed was to see how they were by themselves. That I could be the observer there, and to see how they played with their dick and how it was formed, the shape of it, and when it became hard."
"Despite all this love you have for me, you never once suggested that we leave our mates and run off together, for the simple reason that I am penniless and he is rich."
"If I could just get a break from the bookkeeping part of it. If I could get away from the staff part of it."
"I can no longer endure you to have other women. It hurts too much. The pain is just too great!"
"It was beautiful, still, aesthetically charming, melancholy perhaps, but not a cemetery that made you downhearted when you entered it—it was so charming that it sometimes looked as though it had nothing to do with death."
"But when the roads were plowed, the weather was good, the sun down, and Roseanna gone, he drove his Chevy up to the top of Battle Mountain and parked at the cleared entrance to a hiking path about a quarter mile east of the cemetery."
"What do you want? If you want to say something . . ."
"Without Drenka it was unendurable—he didn’t have a life, except at the cemetery."
"Her rent was free, lunches were free, and in addition she was paid twenty-five dollars a week."
"Three times Drenka had been by herself to see Christa there but, fearful that Sabbath would be angry with her if he knew, she did not tell him."
"You were there?" she asked. "Yes. I took my children, my little children. So they would be present at a musical milestone."
"And then there is techno, and then there is more techno—music made by a machine. It’s a sound that just makes you dance."
"And you, what brings you to Madamaska Falls?" asked Father Time jovially.
"Sure, I get lonely. It’s hard to make friendships with Americans."
"He could take her anywhere. He could turn at Shear Shop Corner and take her up to Battle Mountain and strangle her to death in her tuxedo."
"But Sabbath had simplified his life and fit the other concerns in around fucking."
"I don’t know if he was frightened of me so he couldn’t really get it up."
"But that’s New York. Anyway, I needed a change. I want to spend my time doing something else, a job dealing with people."
"I’m not afraid of you. People in New York can get a little strange. But not here. I feel at home here."
"I start with one thing and something else happens. A good puppet makes itself. I just go with it."
"Your hand is right where the puppet’s heart is. I am the carpenter and you are the soul."
"Many Americans hated their homes. The number of homeless in America couldn’t touch the number of Americans who had homes and families and hated the whole thing."
"Eat her pussy. At night, when she gets in from the meeting. It’ll astonish her."
"A psychiatrist from the state hospital in Blackwall who ran a private practice a couple of days a week once told Sabbath, who’d asked what it was he treated people for up here in the mountains, 'Incest, wife beating, drunkenness—in that order.'"
"She couldn’t tell her left from her right, let alone add, subtract, multiply, or divide."
"She would startle him by wrapping herself in a towel when she came out of the shower and, if he was in her path, rushing past him for the bedroom."
"Sabbath knew about them only what he’d overheard Roseanna saying on the phone to the do-gooding friends."
"His range of pleasures was narrow and never did extend to the evening news."
"You can’t leaf through a paper, any paper anywhere, without searching still for some clue about Nikki."
"You are not living with the dead, you are living with the living."
"Nikki’s orgasm was like a convulsion, the body bolting its skin."
"The only way for me to understand it was not to think about it."
"There was something thrillingly alien about 'Mick.'"
"Wifeless, mistressless, penniless, vocationless, homeless . . . and now, on the run."
"He’d paid the full price for art, only he hadn’t made any."
"Obeying the laws of disappointment, disobedient Sabbath began to cry."
"Crave? Please. No, Sabbath didn’t believe a word he said and hadn’t for years."
"Good. They’d let him stay for at least a week."
"The beers went to your head. When someone is exhausted and down like you, everything gets exaggerated."
"Then you get married and your wife disappears."
"What difference would it make if I minded? It wouldn’t change anything."
"Patience, patience. ‘Nothing illegal is achieved without patience.’ Benjamin Franklin."
"Neither a philo- nor an anti-Semite be; / And it must follow, as the night the day, / Thou canst not then be false to any man."
"All the Jews will be begging when there is a black Mount Rushmore, my dear, and not a day sooner—when there is a black Mount Rushmore with Michael Jackson, Jesse Jackson, Bo Jackson, and Ray Charles carved upon its face."
"Avoid actresses. How about shiksas? For a Jew who studies Buddhism the shiksa is not forbidden to eat. Ben Franklin: ‘God forgive those who don’t fuck in the ass.’"
"I concentrate on internal sacrifices to the sacred fires in my own self."
"The cause goes free, the effect goes to jail."
"If you can still do something, then you must do it! Anything living can figure that out."
"Life is impenetrable. For all Sabbath knew, he had just thrown over a girl who had neither betrayed nor bebitched him and never could—a simple, adventurous girl who loved her father and would never deceive any grown man."
"Sparing my feelings, isn’t that nice. But you needn’t. You learn by sixty to accept in a sporting spirit the derision of virtuous bystanders."
"A thousand thank-yous for your longed-for letter today! It made me so happy that I now feel like another person."
"Please write as often as you can to us. It doesn’t have to be a long epistle but just a short greeting that you are fine."
"Shall I clean out your room and try to forget that you ever existed?"
"Please do not judge me harshly. Live happily! Dad."
"An ordinary autumn late afternoon—which is to say, radiant and extraordinary."
"Childhood at its very best is recalled, and the abatement, if not of adulthood, at least of dread seems for the moment possible."
"You are my most beloved child and the emptiness is enormous without you."
"I felt very tomboyish because I didn’t have women who could take care of me and give me advice."
"My father came into my room and he said, 'Oh, I’m falling in love.' I pretended that I knew nothing."
"I haven’t read them since he died. When I got them in the mail I couldn’t read them. To receive a letter from my father made me nauseated all day."
"My therapist and I have talked about it and I know now that I was robbed by you of the ability to have a normal relationship with a normal man."
"What am I supposed to do about being left on hold all day? Everything is such a fight."
"But life was over. The family was finished. I was finished."
"What follows is an uncensored transcription of the entire conversation as it was secretly taped by Kathy Goolsbee."
"What are you doing right now? I’m on my stomach. I’m masturbating."
"I think that’s the problem. It’s like I react to it. I have to rebel or something."
"It’s the Sundays that keep these couples together. As if Sundays alone could be any worse."
"I’m proud to say I still have all my marbles as far as racial hatred is concerned."
"If Yahweh wanted me to be calm, he would have made me a goy."
"I haven’t seen last Sunday’s Times for over thirty years," Sabbath said, "but why not?"
"The simplest formulations in English are barely endurable. ‘Not now.’ Say that again. Treat me like shit."
"It’s not life repossessed that I expect to encounter. That exaltation is long gone."
"I love my wife and children more than anything in this world."
"The immensity of your isolation is horrifying. That’s all I really mean to say."
"I don’t think you ever gave isolation a real shot. It’s the best preparation I know of for death."
"Nothing will do it. We have no idea how it’s going to turn out."
"It’s always been hard for you, Norman, hasn’t it, to imagine me?"
"Beloved Whoremonger, Seducer, Sodomist, Abuser of Women, Destroyer of Morals, Ensnarer of Youth, Uxoricide, Suicide."
"The chief pleasure of fishing is getting out of the house."
"The great generational kick of standing down on the beach in the dusk with your older brother."
"It’s no good to be alone. It’s a lonely life."
"Something is there that is not my mother’s ghost: she’s down in the grave with her ghost."
"I wish I was never born. 'Cause death, death is a terrible thing."
"They were walking across the park. I took a walk. And I met them on the way."
"We are immoderate because grief is immoderate."
"I remember you so well, on the street with the truck, all the ladies coming out of the houses—"
"I got Delicious apples. I put in an apple to bake."
"I think, when I think of dying, I think I wish I was never born."
"I give my heart, I give my self, in my fucking."