Robert Stone Quotes

What I wonder," Bob Cole said in his strange tremulous voice, "is whether the people down here have to live this way so that we can live the way we do. We have to believe it's no, don't we? We couldn't face up to it otherwise. Because if most of the world lives in this kind of poverty so that we can have our goodies and our extra protein ration - what does that make us?

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

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 were two hungers and an illusion of fulfilment.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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

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.

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.