The Lincoln Highway Quotes
"There is a time in every man’s education when he arrives at the conviction that envy is ignorance; that imitation is suicide; that he must take himself for better, for worse, as his portion."
"Because a farmer with a mortgage was like a man walking on the railing of a bridge with his arms outstretched and his eyes closed."
"But a carpenter didn’t lie awake at night worrying about the weather. He welcomed the extremes of nature."
"The way I figure it, Mr. Schulte, it was Job who had the oxen, and Noah who had the hammer."
"It wasn’t because Emmett knew Mr. Schulte to be a friendly man, or because he lived in one of the nicest houses in town. Emmett went to Mr. Schulte because he figured that no matter what happened, a carpenter would always have work."
"So one evening when Emmett was fifteen and the school year nearly over, he had ridden his bike into town, knocked on Mr. Schulte’s door, and asked for a job."
"But the whole collection made Emmett uneasy, like the two of them were looking at someone else’s private correspondence—something they had no business seeing."
"He had spent hours in the little library at Salina turning through the pages of the almanac and the volumes of the encyclopedia until the question of where they should go had become perfectly clear."
"But if, on the one hand, it was an excuse, on the other, it was an exhortation—an exhortation for Emmett that he should feel no remorse, no guilt, no hesitation in turning his back on the three hundred acres to which his father had dedicated half his life, as long as he abandoned them in order to pursue without envy or imitation his own portion, and in so doing discover that which he alone was capable of."
"Woolly, he washed those dishes like his life depended on it. With his head bent at a forty-five-degree angle and the tip of his tongue poking between his teeth, he circled the sponge over the surface of the plates with a tireless intention."
"That’s why it’s usually more trouble than it’s worth to explain yourself. But not Emmett Watson. He’s the type of guy who can see the whole picture right from the word go—the grander scheme and all the little details."
"I’ve met a lot of people in our great nation and many of them from the isle of Manhattan, but to the best of my knowledge, I have never had the pleasure of meeting your professor."
"No one needs a pool or a butler, Billy. But I think what you will need is a few more bedrooms."
"Because, in point of fact, The Three Musketeers is a story about four musketeers. Yes, it opens with the delightful camaraderie of Orthos and Pathos and Artemis. But the central business of the tale is the means by which the young adventurer joins the ranks of the swashbuckling threesome."
"It has been observed that that which comforts the stomach dullens the wits."
"You didn’t need permission, so much as initiative."
"The willingness to take a beating: That’s how you can tell you’re dealing with a man of substance."
"Time is that which God uses to separate the idle from the industrious."
"For what is kindness but the performance of an act that is both beneficial to another and unrequired?"
"To bake an apple pie, you’ve first got to make the dough."
"Traditions, the very means by which we come to know who we are, are nothing if not old-fashioned."
"Promise me that whenever you feel like hitting someone in anger, first you’ll count to ten."
"So keeping the steering wheel in his left hand, he held the map up in his right. That way he could look at the map out of one eye and the road out of the other."
"Once a gas station map is open all the way, just the sight of it is likely to make you woozy."
"But in order to read a gas station map, you have to unfold and unfold and unfold it until the Pacific Ocean is up against the gear shift and the Atlantic Ocean is lapping at the passenger-side door."
"The Howard Johnson’s map didn’t have to be unfolded at all. And it wasn’t covered with a confusion of highways and byways."
"It’s like the labyrinth in Billy’s book, the one designed so ingeniously by Daedalus that no one who entered ever came out alive."
"If you hit someone with a can, I figured you might do as much damage to your fingers as you did to his skull."
"The cast-iron skillet was perfect in just about every respect, despite the fact that there was nothing modern or convenient about it."
"To hit him a second time would just put me in his debt."
"The only problem was that Emmett couldn’t remember the name of the building."
"He looked like he could have used his own dousing."
"For every room there was a weakness, and for every weakness an artifact bearing witness."
"Some evidence of that one desire so delectable, so insatiable that it overshadowed all others."
"All I can say is that when the transmission falls out, don't expect me to replace it."
"If I know what to expect from my truck, I know even better what to expect from you."
"The captains were playing cribbage on their ketches."
"The city of New York silent, motionless, and virtually uninhabited."
"Like one of those blindered horses in Central Park, you're not supposed to see anything other than the next two steps in front of you."
"But as soon as he explained that he was the son of a touring rodeo operator looking to hire a performer, her expression brightened."
"You have to understand that they are besieged from morning to night by artists of all persuasions who are trying to talk their way into a meeting."
"Within the walls of the Statler Building, he who misrepresents himself well, represents himself best."
"The sheer scale and garishness of it all made Emmett disinclined to buy a single thing that was being advertised."
"The notion of Duchess taking three punches in front of a gathering of witnesses gave him a strange sense of foreboding."
"Every aspect of the way she moved in the dark...suggested this was something of a routine."
"For to make a Chippendale or van der Rohe chair in such tiny dimensions surely had to be harder than to make one you could sit on."
"The clothes make the man, or so the saying goes. But all you have to do is look at a row of fedoras to know what a bunch of baloney that is."
"Every time we made the circuit, Clarise would slide a little closer, until there was no more closer to slide."
"The important thing now, I explained, is to keep an eye on it."
"It seemed to me a long and complicated way of proving something that my six-year-old brother could disprove in a matter of seconds with his own two feet."
"Scholars have handed down a specialized word, the sole purpose of which is to identify the practice of teaching nonsense as sense."
"He was the one who had been innocent. He was the one who had been sent to Salina having done nothing at all."
"For as it turned out, the coffee and cake were just what he needed."
"Times changed. The neighborhood changed. Tastes changed."
"This friend of yours—Woolly. What’s his story?"
"But with this crowd, nothing ever changes. Not the names. Not the addresses. Not a single damn thing."
"What right did he have to demand of Duchess that he atone for his sins?"
"The irony hidden in the old performer’s story wasn’t lost on Emmett for a second."
"The Mandarin’s Box to make my trusted cockatoo vanish and reappear right before your eyes."
"The Comptons ate their cabbage in the kitchen!"
"The important thing to understand about listening to a mystery show on the radio is that all the parts designed to make you anxious were relatively quiet."
"For a one-of-a-kind kind of day deserves to be relived at the slowest possible pace."