Rant: An Oral Biography Of Buster Casey Quotes
"Like most people, I didn’t meet and talk to Rant Casey until after he was dead."
"Anybody makes a livelihood selling cars will tell you: Repetition is the mother of all skills."
"A good trick to remember a name is you look the person in the eyes long enough to register their color."
"History is nothing except monsters or victims. Or witnesses."
"Life’s greatest comfort is being able to look over your shoulder and see people worse off, waiting in line behind you."
"Some people are just born human. The rest of us, we take a lifetime to get there."
"The future you have tomorrow won’t be the same future you had yesterday."
"You’re a different human being to everybody you meet."
"You only ever is in the eyes of other folks."
"The first life that maniac Rant Casey wrecked was Irene’s. The first bright future he ever ended was his mama’s."
"Not everybody enjoys baseball or even fishing, but every person is obsessed with himself. You are your own favorite hobby. You’re an expert on you."
"All a good salesman does is make eye contact, mimic your body language, nod or laugh or grunt to prove he’s spell-bound—those noises or gestures, they’re called 'verbal attends.'"
"Any good salesman will tell you: Before a customer cares how much you know, that customer wants to know how much you care."
"And your truly effective salesman, he knows how to fake that he really, truly does give a shit."
"Pit vipers, just about half the time they forget to inject their venom."
"Instead of boosting peaks, Rant wanted to go fishing. He used to say, 'My life might be little and boring, but at least it's mine—not some assembly-line, secondhand, hand-me-down life.'"
"History is, the girls Rant liked, he used to kiss. Boys, he took them out animal-fishing. Both ways it was a test of your faith."
"Getting bit by a rattlesnake, that's pretty low-tech."
"In really effective pacing, a salesman adopts the learning style of the customer—visual or hearing or touch—to the point of looking up or sideways or down at the ground while you talk."
"Wax could tell you details the gaddamn owners never could."
"A night a while back, I watched some Hit Man scrape every inch of paint off the body of a half-million-dollar Saleen S7."
"That people hired a Hit Man demonstrated their love for a particular vehicle."
"One point, a Jaguar X-Type, Wax says, 'Can you believe this?'"
"Anybody calls three fouls on you inside of two months, and you stop getting notified about the next game."
"No bullshit, but I’ve watched people stop in the middle of a funeral, the dead body smiling there in the casket, and people stop to change the music."
"In Party Crash culture, Karl Waxman was known as a 'Hit Man.'"
"No bullshit. If your car skids into oncoming traffic, and you die listening to The Archies sing 'Sugar Sugar,' it’s your own damn laziness."
"Certain Party Crashers you could tell were Hit Men or Hit Women."
"The worse my folks think of me," he says, "the less they’ll hurt about me being gone."
"We project the worst aspects of ourselves into the vehicles around us on the road."
"In a car accident, you slow down to dream time."
"Every night since that night has become the postmortem of Party Crashing."
"Death is a tragic event, but stopping the flow of traffic is always seen as the greater crime."
"The joy occurs when, with one nudge or scrape, that enemy vehicle bursts open to reveal human beings."
"Nobody can call me prejudiced. For their information, my own daughter is a so-called Nighttimer."
"The worst accidents, I go into automatic pilot."
"The river ice, gritty with dirt, but slippery under my shoes."
"With two fingers, I pinched the coin out of the dirty frost."
"Echo Lawrence: They don’t know I saw, but I woke up in the backseat of the car."
"I started to step back, making my fist tight around the gold coin."
"His eyes and mouth made just a look. Not a smile or frown, more how you’d look if you was alone."
"The man’s fingers worked into the knotted yarn, and he said, 'Relax.'"
"To save my sweater, I stepped closer, saying, 'You’re going to ruin it…'"
"The air smelled like clean water in a clear glass on a hot day."
"The river, froze solid. No wind. Like we was outside of time."
"The dogs barking woke me up. Still parked, watching Rant’s old house."
"I remember trying to hold my breath, because, every time I breathed out, he settled on top of me, heavier."
"The living, alive blood and piss of me, freezing."
"Walking back to Christmas dinner, I asked him, 'Who exactly are you?'"
"Echo Lawrence: Loops, like embroidery stitches."
"The Easter egg that Rant left for me, he’d written on it with white wax."
"The Christmas sky floated over him, blue as embroidery floss."
"And with my every breath out, he settled heavier on top of me."
"The living always feel superior to the dead."