Robert Stone Quotes

In all the working systems, she thought, the weakness was always yourself - that spot of gristle in the gears. It applied on every level - even the act of getting through a day could be performed with gusto and dispatch if you kept out of your own way. Justin believed that she knew as much as anyone about self-struggle.

It isn't religion they need down here," Heath declared after five minutes. "They've had plenty of that. It's the pill. If this coast had half the population it has it would be in damn fine shape.

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.

"Believe only what you know," he said.

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

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

You goin' to get killed one time, you know that?
"You don't never get out of this world alive.

The fact is," Nuala said, "we're in different situations. For each of us it's different.

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.

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."

This way madness lies.

But you got to hang on, she thought. You got to hang on because if you lose hold you'll just break up and drift off and go washin' off the edge of this fuckin' world, you'll just melt down into a sprinkle of powder with nobody there, you'll be sawdust for them to sweep up or spit into.

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.

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

It brought him to a latticed gate over which a small, iron Christ stared down in wide-eyed rusty death from the gibbet of a green, oxidised cross.