Harlem Shuffle Quotes
"Carney was only slightly bent when it came to being crooked…"
"You got to know your limits as a man and master them."
"Everyone had secret corners and alleys that no one else saw—what mattered were your major streets and boulevards, the stuff that showed up on other people’s maps of you."
"It’s hard to make your start in this city when you have no help."
"Living taught you that you didn’t have to live the way you’d been taught to live."
"The way he saw it, living taught you that you didn’t have to live the way you’d been taught to live."
"In the service industry you shift your approach depending on the customer."
"Tradition called for hoods and gangsters to dump bodies in Mount Morris Park; the joke was that Chink had his own reserved spot, like a private parking space."
"The morning after Freddie’s Nightbirds pitch, Carney took Sandra’s words for wisdom about knowing your limitations."
"Operating expenses. The price of doing business, like rent and insurance and Ma Bell. Squint at it, the five hundred to Duke was an investment."
"He resisted the urge to sell him on the Airform core."
"If there was one thing he’d learned in recent days, it was that common sense and a practical nature are a great boon in the execution of criminal enterprises."
"Who wouldn’t want to live on Riverside Drive? A few blocks north was the Burbank."
"He checked once more to see if he was sweating through it."
"The price of doing business, like rent and insurance and Ma Bell. Squint at it, the five hundred to Duke was an investment."
"It's good to have family when you come to a new place."
"You have to have an inside you, and an outside you."
"Time goes by, and a girl's got to wonder if a man like Willie'd like to know that someone's dogging him."
"A man should have a safe big enough to hold his secrets. Bigger, even, so you have room to grow."
"Everybody talked so nice about her, it made me so mad."
"You say goodbye to old challenges and welcome new ones."
"Being that selective, sometimes a man, if he wants to head to the front of the line, he'll add a sweetener."
"The Great Depression produced a lot of extravagant design, so that your wife’s dress could look like a million bucks."
"It’s not like that. It’s your body telling you what it wants, and then you do it. That’s how we did it in the old days."
"You can’t go anywhere these days without stumbling into a hotbed."
"You don’t want people to think you have a forgetful nature."
"Too much silence and you might get to thinking about things."
"Life is cheap, and when things start getting expensive, it gets cheaper still."
"It was dangerous, the product of a demented mind."
"That’s why you shouldn’t read over people’s shoulders."
"The black city and the white city: overlapping, ignorant of each other, separate and connected by tracks."
"You can have all sorts of craziness in your head and people will walk right by you as if you are a normal person."
"Sometimes Big Mike’s face lurked in his son’s face, in the eyes and the frown, and his friend was returned to him."
"I like plenty of folks, I just don’t like people."
"A man was allowed to make changes if he saw fit."
"The job had started fine. A routine hijacking, trailer full of overcoats, sleepy Sunday night."
"It probably had something to do with getting stabbed in the stomach."
"They were clean-cut young men, in gas company uniforms that were not theirs."
"He hadn’t seen him since the funeral, and even then they hadn’t spoken."
"You don’t have to be first. Second is fine. If you have an eye for what’s going to pan out, second is fine."
"We all have our station in life—people, stars, cities—and even if no one looked after Carney and no one suspected him capable of much at all, he was going to make himself into something."