A Fine and Private Place

Quotes

1. I am infected with life and will die of it in time.

   p. 255

2. 

   I walked a long way that night, thinking many philosophic thoughts which, fortunately, I don’t remember.

   p. 61

3. 

   “Ravens bring things to people. We’re like that. It’s our nature. We don’t like it. We’d much rather be eagles, or swans, or even one of those moronic robins, but we’re ravens and there you are. Ravens don’t feel right without somebody to bring things to, and when we do find somebody we realize what a silly business it was in the first place.” He made a sound between a chuckle and a cough. “Ravens are pretty neurotic birds. We’re closer to people than any other bird, and we’re bound to them all our lives, but we don’t have to like them. You think we brought Elijah food because we liked him? He was an old man with a dirty beard.”

   p. 13

4. 

   You’re greediest when you’re born, and after that it’s downhill all the way. Live to be two hundred and you wouldn’t demand anything.

   p. 102

5. 

   I was lost too. What else would I have been doing in Iowa?

   p. 160

6. 

   I’ve always thought cemeteries were like cities. There are streets, avenues—you’ve seen them, I think, Michael. There are blocks, too, and house numbers, slums and ghettos, middle-class sections and small palaces.

   p. 27

7. 

   He sighed, telling himself that the inevitable is a great blessing to a man weary of making choices.

   p. 229

8. 

   There is no such thing as abstract justice. There is such a thing as law. The difference should be apparent.

   p. 206

9. 

   There are honest people in the world, but only because the devil considers their asking prices ridiculous.

   p. 135

10. 

    I’m sure I’ll go to heaven. I’ve been dull enough.

    p. 48

11. 

    Walking by yourself in the rain is for college kids who think loneliness makes poets.

    p. 185

12. 

    It’s like marriage. The race there is between total knowledge of each other and death. If death comes first, it’s considered a successful marriage.

    p. 199

13. 

    If I sound petty and malicious, it’s because I am.

    p. 184

14. 

    Now is it their friendship I want, he wondered, or their dependency?…Am I so tired and so purposeless that I want to keep them with me forever, living off their need and their loneliness? You can’t do that, Jonathan. They are minds, and you cannot make minds dependent on you. That would surely make you the devil.

    p. 153

15. 

    He knew very well that the great majority of human conversation is meaningless. A man can get through most of his days on stock answers to stock questions, he thought. Once he catches onto the game, he can manage with an assortment of grunts. This would not be so if people listened to each other, but they don’t. They know that no one is going to say anything moving and important to them at that very moment. Anything important will be announced in the newspapers and reprinted for those who missed it. No one really wants to know how his neighbor is feeling, but he asks him anyway, because it is polite, and because he knows that his neighbor certainly will not tell him how he feels. What this woman and I say to each other is not important. It is the simple making of sounds that pleases us.

    p. 43

16. 

    The one delusion you never had in your life was the one about the permanence of happiness.

    p. 244

17. 

    “There are people,” he said, “who give, and there are people who take. There are people who create, people who destroy, and people who don’t do anything and drive the other two kinds crazy. It’s born in you, whether you give or take, and that’s the way you are.”

    p. 13

18. 

    “I’ll tell you something. Once I was very fond of a poem by Emily Dickinson or somebody. I only remember one line of it, but it goes, ‘The soul selects her own society.’ I used to tell it to everybody. Once I quoted it to a friend of mine, and he said, ’Maybe, but the body gets thrown into bed with the goddamnedest people.’”

    p. 201

19. 

    It was an old trick, one he remembered from every discussion and bull session he had ever taken part in: if you don’t know, make it up. Nobody ever admitted he didn’t know a quotation, or a book, or an essay on something. The rule also had a corollary: if you’re not sure, it’s Marlowe.

    p. 30

20. 

    Goddam organizers, he thought. You get something good going, and somebody comes along and organizes it. He told himself that this was inevitable, the way of the world, but it bothered him. The raven would have been in favor of a movement in the general direction of chaos, consternation, and disorganization, had he not known that such a project would require the most organization of all. Besides, there would undoubtedly be a squirrel running it.

    p. 87

21. 

    He had always detested funerals and avoided them as much as possible. But it’s different, he thought, when it’s your own funeral. You feel it’s one of those occasions that shouldn’t be missed.

    p. 18

22. 

    He had foreseen every such change in his fortune, ignored it always, and called the refusal innocence.

    p. 174

23. 

    Forget it, Jonathan, and go back to sleep. And before you go to sleep, pray that no well-meaning god ever makes you immortal.

    p. 138

24. 

    “The dead,” he had said once, “need nothing from the living, and the living can give nothing to the dead.” At twenty-two, it had sounded precocious; at thirty-four, it sounded mature, and this pleased Michael very much. He had liked being mature and reasonable. He disliked ritual and pomposity, routine and false emotion, rhetoric and sweeping gestures. Crowds made him nervous. Pageantry offended him. Essentially a romantic, he had put away the trappings of romance, although he had loved them deeply and never known.

    p. 16

25. 

    Funny that I should become such a great believer in justice. I always used to open my history courses by telling the students that if they expected to hear a series of movie scenarios, with the good guys winning in the end, they might as well all go home because not only didn’t the good guys win, but there weren’t any good guys.

    p. 206

26. 

    Love is not an excuse for bad taste.

    p. 232

27. 

    Beautiful is a word for young people. Beauty is a phase you grow through, like acne.

    p. 110

28. 

    What can I tell you, Laura? That I confused justice and revenge? People do that a great deal, and they always have.

    p. 206

That’s all the quotes.

28 quotes in the collection · come back when we add more