Robert Stone Quotes

It's what you want, he told himself. Don't obsess over it. Do it.

"Lately we seem to get into arguments about what the country's about."
"I thought that was the national pastime."
"It is," Ernest said.

Over and over our plans foundered on human nature. On the mediocrity of human nature that betrays its better self, its best ideals, that is unworthy of itself everywhere.
"Shocking, the mediocrity of everything - is it not?

Don't laugh at my fantasies," she said. "Not if you want to be in them.

It can't be an easy thing," Lucas said, "to make a country. It's tough enough to make a café. Or to make one be the way you imagined it. Unless you only let certain people in and keep the rest out.

"And stay away from the wrong people."
"You never know who's who," Lucas said.

"Ladies and gentlemen," Holliwell declaimed, "esteemed colleagues." Who in hell, he wondered, are these people?

If somebody ever tells you, Geraldine, that they need you, you tell them to buy a dog.

The thing to do with embarrassment," he told the young American couple who seemed determined to engage him, "is work it all the way to humiliation.

When you stir up the bottom you naturally bring up some big fish.

Honey, this town has got just one principal industry where girls is concerned. They can call it what they like but it generally always ends you up in the same position.

There's a story about how people are," Holliwell told Pablo. "It's about a buffalo and a scorpion. I'm sure you've heard it.
"A scorpion comes up to a buffalo on a riverbank. Please, sir, says the scorpion - could you give us a ride across? No way, says the buffalo. You'll sting me and I'll drown. But the scorpion swears he won't. Why would I, he asks the buffalo, when if I did, I'd drown along with you? So off they go. Halfway across the scorpion stings the buffalo. And the poor buffalo says, you bastard, you killed us both. Before they go under, the scorpion says - it's my nature.

One wore a brown army-style sweater, extensively darned and full of holes. The darning was old and unraveling; it looked as if someone had once cared enough to repair his sweaters and then just given up.

With the thought came the recollection of a poem he had once heard read, about a mouse so frightened it went to the cat for love.

They don't worry too much if they get the wrong man," Ernest said. "They reckon whoever they get is probably guilty of something. Or would have been eventually. And if he didn't do anything, he probably wanted to.