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.

You see," Heath said, "I'm the wrath of God in my tiny way. I don't go seeking out the misguided and the perverse, not at all. Those afflicted find me. I'm the shark on the bottom of the lagoon. You have to sink a damn long way before you get to me. When you do, I'm waiting.

There were two hungers and an illusion of fulfilment.

"Believe only what you know," he said.

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.

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.

You and I, my boy, compose a tiny island of sanity in what is otherwise a fucking nuthouse.

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.

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.

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.

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.

"I know that in the United States people are what they choose to be," he said.

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.

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

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