Robert Stone Quotes

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?

Hey, Cecil," Pablo said, "I want to ask you something, man. Promise you won't get pissed? What do you think is the use of me?"
"De use of you?" Cecil asked, incredulous.
"The use - you know. The use of me."
"Well now . . ." Cecil began. A throb of laughter trembled in his throat. "Dat be hard to say, you know."
"Cecil, I'm the first fucker in the world knows that. But right off ... what would you say the use of me was?"
"De use of you, mon? Same as everbody. Put one foot to front of de other. Match de dolluh wif de day."
"That's all?"
"Sure dat's all. Good times, hard times. Mos' certainly dat's all."
"Don't you think everybody got some special purpose?"
"Hey," Cecil demanded, "what I look like - a preacher, mon? Purpose of you and me to be buried in de ground and das hard enough to do. Be buried in de sweet ground and not in dat ocean." They drank their rum together.
"Dreamin' be de ruin of you, sailor. Be de ruin. Old chap, you too young to be worryin' after dose tings. Be burnin' out your mind."
"It is burning," Pablo said. "Burning out."
"Go to sleep, Pablo. Go upstairs and sleep it off, mon.

Don't go alone to lonely places.

"Believe only what you know," he said.

It's a Walt fucking Disney true life adventure, sweetheart," he told her. "That's all it is.

Discretion came hard to Lucas, who tended to think slowly and aloud, but it was time to try a little harder.

We're at a very primitive stage of mankind," Nolan declared, "that's what people don't understand. Just pick up the Times on any given day and you've got a catalogue of ape behaviour. Strip away the slogans and excuses and verbiage, the so-called ideology, and you're reading about what one pack of chimpanzees did to another.

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

Everyone loses everything in the end.

She did not want to bury him here, she thought, under a twisted wire cross. There was a stone vault for him under the lime trees in California, where he could sleep with all those other shadows who had worn down their steps on carpeted altars by candlelight. Broken their hearts, minds, sex and entrails in the imperfect service of their Holy One, their Hanged Man.

Are we friends today?" she asked him.
"There's a level, Justin, on which we're always friends. Then there's a level on which we can't be.

People liked to get you thinking you were small-time. That way, they made out and you got fucked. It was that way now, he thought: they were in the cabin talking big-time scores and he was hauling groceries for them. They might pay him or they might not; he was a yo-yo to them. One of life's little yo-yos.
But the fact was, they were old and soft. They were making it big, they had made their move, but they were soft. Surely, he thought, their day was over. It was someone else's turn now, someone smarter and tougher. And it was all in your mind; if you let weak people buffalo you, they would keep you down. He had been letting them do it all his life and it was time to call them on it. He was young, he was strong, a soldier of fortune. He had seen them up close, they were nothing much.
You had to take risks, there was nothing for free.

When you get too far from Madison, Wisconsin, it gets unsanitary," Tom Zecca said. "The people get funny-looking and it's hot."
"My grandfather," Tom Zecca told them, "always said to me - kid, you don't know how lucky you are to live in America. Back there it's all shit. You take your hat off and you eat dirt. Here you got it made.

We have a proverb, sir, in my grandfather's country. In his island. I'm positive they have the same proverb in China. It goes 'To trust is good. Not to trust is better.'

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