Robert Stone Quotes

And that was it, he thought. It was all a series of rooms one never found one's way out of. You had to be content with that, or die, or go completely crazy.

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

He kept not looking at her. This, Sonia had come to realize, usually meant something, though it was often difficult to decide what. Shyness, morbid hypersensitivity and homicidal racism could all assume the same aspect.

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.

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

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.

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

He thought she was a unicorn to be speared, penned, and adored. He wanted her white goodness, wanted a skin of it. He wanted to wash in it, to drink and drink and drink of it.

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?

This way madness lies.

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

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.

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.

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

A different voice sounded from the field now, an old man's voice.
"Where are they now," the voice asked sadly, "those godly farms, the dear little streets of homely homes and friendly faces? Ploughed under, I say, or about to be - in this black age of arrogance and agitation, misfits and miscegenation! Friends, a teeming rootless rabble gnaws at the sacred fabric of our way of life. The sun shone less brightly on God's country this morning."