The Body Quotes
"Progress. It was a sort of social club, although it had no name."
"The game was usually blackjack and we played for pennies, nickel limit."
"Besides playing cards, the club was a good place to go and smoke cigarettes and look at girly books."
"When it rained, being in the club was like being inside a Jamaican steel drum."
"Teddy and Chris and I were up in the club on that Friday morning, glooming to each other about school being so near."
"Nobody’s garden had done doodly-squat that year."
"Gordie’s out, ole Gordie just bit the bag and stepped out the door."
"Every now and then he got bonked a good one."
"Teddy’s dad took Teddy over to the big woodstove at the back of the kitchen and shoved the side of Teddy’s head down against one of the cast-iron burner plates."
"You got to, man. Sincerely. You won’t believe this."
"I cried when I heard, and I cried more at the funeral, and I couldn’t believe that Dennis was gone."
"It hurt me and it scared me that he could be dead."
"It took me a long time after that summer to realize that most of the tears I cried were for my mom and dad."
"You ran all the way from your place? Man, you’re crazy."
"We’ll just tell em we got bored tenting in Vern’s field because we’ve done it so many times before."
"Chris didn’t talk much about his dad, but we all knew he hated him like poison."
"Chris was smart, really smart, but he played truant a lot."
"So are we set? Who wants to play some more scat?"
"I got to my house at quarter of eleven, after stopping at the drugstore to check out the paperbacks."
"Dad was out back, passing a fine spray from the hose over his ruined garden."
"My mom was fifty-five—no spring chicken, either."
"Let me put it this way: I was as sad for Denny’s dying as I was when I heard on the radio that Dan Blocker had died."
"Chico stands at the window, arms crossed, elbows on the ledge that divides upper and lower panes, naked, looking out, breath fogging the glass."
"Dirty March. You’re some old whore, Chico thinks."
"He sees it again, though: the skidding, skating Ford Mustang."
"I never had any friends later on like the ones I had when I was twelve. Jesus, did you?"
"Different strokes for different folks, they say now, and that’s cool."
"The word conjures an image of the GS&WM railroad tracks running into a perspective-point in the distance, burnished so white under the sun that when you closed your eyes you could still see them there in the dark, only blue instead of white."
"Baseball had become important to me in the last couple of years, ever since I’d had to face the knowledge that baseball players were as much flesh and blood as I was."
"I asked for three pounds of hamburger and got some hamburger rolls, four bottles of Coke and a two-cent churchkey to open them with."
"Instead of some huge hellhound with red, savage eyes and teeth jutting out of his mouth like straight-pipes from a hotrod, I was looking at a medium-sized mongrel dog that was a perfectly common black and white."
"I remember the year he was All-Conference. Halfback, he played. Yuh. Could he run? Father God and Sonny Jesus! You’re probably too young to remember."
"You come back here!" Milo bawled. "Come back here or I’ll sic my dawg on you, goddammit!"
"The smart thing to have done would have been to just agree with the guy and go around, but by then I was so keyed that instead of doing the smart thing I just broke for the fence with a wild yell, my sneakers kicking up dirt."
"We heard what you said about his father," I told him. "We’re all witnesses. And you sicced that dog on me. That’s against the law."
"We all said we wouldn’t tell, and a glum silence fell over us again."
"The river was better than a hundred yards across at that point in 1960; I’ve been back to look at it since then, and found it had narrowed up quite a bit during the years between."
"If a train came, it was maybe enough room to avoid getting plastered... but the wind generated by a highballing freight would surely sweep you off to fall to a certain death against the rocks just below the surface of the shallow running water."
"Looking at the trestle, we all felt fear start to crawl around in our bellies... and mixing uneasily with the fear was the excitement of a boss dare, a really big one, something you could brag on for weeks after you got home... if you got home."
"I screamed: "TRAIN!" The last of the paralysis fell from me and I began to run."
"It was as if he had lived that whole life already, that life where they tell you to step right up and spin the Wheel of Fortune, and it spins so pretty and the guy steps on a pedal and it comes up double zeros, house number, everybody loses."
"Your friends do. They’re like drowning guys that are holding onto your legs. You can’t save them. You can only drown with them."
"Somewhere up ahead was a dead kid, probably mangled and covered with flies. Maggots, too, by this time."
"By stopping here we figured there had to be at least ten miles between us and him, and of course all four of us knew there were no such things as ghosts, but ten miles seemed just about far enough in case what everybody knew was wrong."
"Love isn't what these asshole poets like McKuen want you to think it is. Love has teeth; they bite; the wounds never close."
"Friends come in and out of your life like busboys in a restaurant, did you ever notice that?"
"Some people drown, that’s all. It’s not fair, but it happens. Some people drown."
"The word is the harm. Love isn’t what these asshole poets like McKuen want you to think it is."
"Speech destroys the functions of love, I think—that’s a hell of a thing for a writer to say, I guess, but I believe it to be true."
"If you speak to tell a deer you mean it no harm, it glides away with a single flip of its tail."
"The most important things are the hardest things to say."