Slouching Towards Bethlehem Quotes
"I went to San Francisco because I had not been able to work in some months, had been paralyzed by the conviction that writing was an irrelevant act, that the world as I had understood it no longer existed."
"The widening gyre, the falcon which does not hear the falconer, the gaze blank and pitiless as the sun."
"If I was to work again at all, it would be necessary for me to come to terms with disorder."
"I am so physically small, so temperamentally unobtrusive, and so neurotically inarticulate that people tend to forget that my presence runs counter to their best interests."
"It is the season of suicide and divorce and prickly dread, wherever the wind blows."
"This is the California where it is possible to live and die without ever eating an artichoke, without ever meeting a Catholic or a Jew."
"In fact there was something left, and a week later it lay in the Draper Mortuary Chapel in a closed bronze coffin blanketed with pink carnations."
"I would like you to believe that I kept working out of some real professionalism, to meet the deadline, but that would not be entirely true."
"That we have made a hero of Howard Hughes tells us something interesting about ourselves."
"The instinct which drove America to the Pacific, all through the nineteenth century, the desire to be able to find a restaurant open in case you want a sandwich."
"Our favorite people and our favorite stories become so not by any inherent virtue, but because they illustrate something deep in the grain, something unadmitted."
"It was a country in which families routinely disappeared, trailing bad checks and repossession papers."
"All that seemed clear was that at some point we had aborted ourselves and butchered the job."
"Nor is my concern with a woman in a dirty crepe-de-Chine wrapper in a Wilmington bar."
"Keepers of private notebooks are a different breed altogether, lonely and resistant rearrangers of things, anxious malcontents."
"The cracked crab that I recall having for lunch the day my father came home from Detroit in 1945 must certainly be embroidery."
"We are not talking here about the kind of notebook that is patently for public consumption."
"The island itself was the prison, and the cold tide its wall. It is precisely what they called it: the Rock."
"Whatever repairs get made on Alcatraz are made to pass the time, a kind of caretaker's scrimshaw."
"I stood for a while in Al Capone’s cell, five by nine feet, not one of the view cells."
"I liked the bleak branches above Washington Square at dawn, and the monochromatic flatness of Second Avenue."
"To live with the Santa Ana is to accept, consciously or unconsciously, a deeply mechanistic view of human behavior."
"The baby frets. The maid sulks. I rekindle a waning argument with the telephone company."
"What it means is that tonight a Santa Ana will begin to blow, a hot wind from the northeast."
"The city burning is Los Angeles’s deepest image of itself."
"The wind shows us how close to the edge we are."
"I remember walking across Sixty-second Street one twilight that first spring, or the second spring, they were all alike for a while."