Jeffrey Ford Quotes

Halloween was close, our favorite holiday because it carried none of the pain-in-the-ass holiness of Christmas and still there was free candy.

The wind and sun, the salt water, the hard work aged a body rapidly, and when I would look at the old man who clammed, I was too young to sense the wisdom their years on the water had bestowed upon them and saw only what I did not want to become.

“You gotta watch that anger. The customer’s always right,” said Merk.
“The customer’s hardly ever right,” said Slackwell.

I understand the human brain. It's a double-edged sword. An evolutionarily development that gives you the wherewithal to know that life is basically a shit pastry one is obliged to eat slowly, and the ability to disguise that fact with beautiful delusions."
"Where do God and the cash come in?" asked Slackwell.
"The cash is the pastry part. God, he just likes to watch us eat. The more we eat the more he loves us. You can't live without love.

Life was never so clear-cut as to offer anything as certain as a war between Heaven and Hell. That was for stories.

Nothing is more comforting to people than to have their certainties trumpeted back to them in bold, clear typeface.

Can you think of anything, my dear Mr. Fell, more intricately complex, more perfectly compact and thoroughly functional than the human eye?"
"No, sir," said August.
"I thought not," said Larchcroft. "Consider this, though. Our eyes were created by light. Without the existence of light, we would not have eyes. Over the long course of man's evolutionarily maturation to his modern condition, light sculpted these magical orbs, making subtle adjustments through the centuries, until now they are capable of the incredible process of sight. This most vital sense, not only a means of self-preservation but the single most important catalyst for culture, is a product of the inherent genius of light.

Now I was stuck and could feel the tide of years suddenly beginning to rise around me.

He’s no physician, he’s Grandfather Mess. He couldn’t cure a pain in the ass unless he left the room.

Real memories intrude now and then as do self-admonitions for a wasted life, but the smoke’s other feature is that it lets you not give a shit about anything but taking in more smoke.

My dear Philosopher," said the countess. "You give sanity a bad name.

Between Heaven and Hell there is this place called reality. Reality might as well be Hell if you don’t have cash.

He kneels and prays to heaven but nothing happens.

In their exquisite self-centeredness our ancestors believed that they were alone in the universe. At the same time, they had convinced themselves that Earth was the blue apple of God’s eye and the sole reason for all of creation. This two-headed fallacy caused humanity both delusions of grandeur and a paranoiac sense of loneliness.

What good is the illusion of fiction if it cannot show us a way to become the people we need to be?