Nelson Algren

Long after midnight old lonely trains called up to Mama like lovers forever arriving too late for love. Up from the long grieving river they called, past track and tower and dock, to windows long darkened and doorways long locked; old beaux that had walked Perdido Street long ago, returning to mourn the names of girls they had loved. They had plenty to spend and all night for loving. But the windows were darkened, the doors were locked, and the only girls whose names they knew had no name now but dust.

‘But blow wise to this, buddy, blow wise to this: Never play cards with a man called Doc. Never eat at a place called Mom's. Never sleep with a woman whose troubles are worse than your own. Never let nobody talk you into shaking another man's jolt. And never you cop another man's plea. I've tried 'em all and I know. They don't work. / Life is hard by the yard, son. But you don't have to do it by the yard. By the inch it's a cinch. And money can't buy everything. For example: poverty.’

When opening time was closing time and everyone was there, down where you lay your money down, where it's everything but square, where hungry young hustlers hustle dissatisfied old cats and ancient glass-eyed satyrs make passes at bandrats; where it's leaping on the tables, where it's howling lowdown blues, when it's everything to gain and not a thing to lose – when it's all bought and paid for then there's always one thing sure: it's some Do-right Daddy-O running the whole show.

Mama had lost the thread. All she could remember was that she had four husbands. / ‘Three of them were thieves and one was a legit man – I'd never marry another legit man. Did you know that a prize fighter is more gentle than other men, outside the ring? That's because he knows what a man's fists can do. Do you know that you're safer living with a man who kills for hire than with a man who has never killed? That's because one knows what killing is. The other don't.’ / ‘Why,’ Navy remarked, ‘in that case ill-fame women ought to make better wives than legitimate girls.’ / Again that odd little silence fell. Nobody knew what to say to that. / ‘Navy, I think that's the nicest thing I've heard anyone say since I've been in the trade,’ Hallie said – [...]

‘If we had such good good generals and all of that, how come we got whupped, Hallie?’ / ‘North had more guns. Go to sleep, Dove.’ / But in the big blue middle of the night she felt a nudge. / ‘Why, in that case it weren't a question or right makin' might after all. It was more a matter of might makin' right.’ / ‘Might makes might,’ she murmured sleepily. / ‘Yes, but how I look at it,’ he made one more ageless decision, ‘the reason the North got most guns was because they had the right to start. What I fail to understand is how come it taken them four years to whup a bunch with such a sorry cause as ourn.’

When we get more houses than we can live in, more cars than we can ride in, more food than we can eat ourselves, the only one way of getting richer is by cutting off those who don't have enough. If everybody has more than enough, what good is my more-than-enough? What good is a wide meadow open to everyone? It isn't until others are fenced out that the open pasture begins to have real value. What good is being a major if you can't have more than a second lieutenant? What good is a second lieutenant for that matter?

‘Mister, I'll cook, I'll cuss, I'll mend yer socks, I'll stoke yer engines 'r catch you a damn whale barehand. [...]’ / ‘You do know that there is a seafaring man's union?’ He gave Dove the benefit of a serious doubt. / ‘Mister, I'm a Christian boy and don't truckle to Yankee notions. Put my name in your ship's dinner-pot and you're my captain, I'm your hand. Just tell me ever-what you want done and I'll 'tend it, for I'm bedcord strong. If I don't turn you out what in your eyes makes a fair day's work you can put me off at the first port of call. Aint that fair enough?’ / ‘Mighty fair, son. If more boys were willing to work for nothing there'd be just that many more millionaires.’

He felt her cold little lips and her small cold mouth, her little cold hands that felt so greedy. / ‘Daddy, you'll never have to work,’ Kitty Twist told Dove. ‘I'll work hard 'n give you all my money.’ / He couldn't see her smiling too knowingly in the dark. / [...] / ‘Red, what I'm trying to say is I'll hustle for you if want me to.’ / ‘I'll hustle for you too,’ he promised. / ‘My God,’ the girl thought, ‘he thinks I mean I'm going to be a shoe-clerk for him. I'm going to have to straighten him out till there's nothing left but kinks.’

A Mexican girl held, in a fold of a yellow shawl, a carnival to her breast. The shawl's dusty fringes, tumbling past her ankles, had gathered enough soot to start a fire itself. Kewpie and child guarded an empty doll buggy on knock-kneed wheels. [...A train comes and goes...] In the ditch at the embankment's foot a doll buggy lay upside down, its wheels still turning this way then that. A few feet away someone had slung a yellow shawl. It stirred. Then its yellow began seeping to black. / ‘The wheel caught the buggy but she wouldn't let go of the handle,’ he heard somebody say. / ‘Wait for the priest,’ said somebody else in such a tone that Dove assumed that the priest, when he came, would explain, in low, simple tones, how a child so small could love a doll so much that she had not feared even a freight train's wheels.

When his eyes had got used to the deep-sea light he discerned a Negro the size of Carnera, naked to the waist and shining with iron-colored sweat, decapitating snapping turtles with silvered precision. / Now the trouble with turtles is that they believe all things come to him who will but struggle. There's always room at the top for one more, they think. And in this strange faith the snapping kind is of all the most devout. For it's precisely that that makes them the snapping kind. Though the way be steep and bloody, that doesn't matter so long as you reach the top of the bleeding heap. / [...] / Dove didn't hesitate. ‘I'll take the tarpon soup.’ / He didn't yet know that there was also room for one more at the bottom.

That nothing could lower human dignity faster than manual labor was understood. ‘Go get yourself a lunch bucket and get back in your ditch’ was the ultimate insult on Perdido Street.

‘When you start hitting toward sixty,’ Gross complained, ‘you feel some days like you want to take a cab to the graveyard and wait for your maker beside your stone. Yet when you've not had an hour's true contentment out of all those sixty years, you don't want to lay down till you've had your hour. You want something for all your pain.’