“When Caroline Walker fell in love with Julian English she was a little tired of him. That was in the summer of 1926, one of the most unimportant years in the history of the United States, and the year in which Caroline Walker was sure her life had reached a pinnacle of uselessness.”
― John O'Hara, quote from Appointment in Samarra
“There were numerous physical combats between husbands and wives, and not always the husbands that matched the wives. Kitty Hofman, for instance, had been given a black eye by Carter Davis when she kicked him in the groin for dunking her head in a punch bowl for calling him a son of a bitch for telling her she looked like something the cat dragged in. And so on.”
― John O'Hara, quote from Appointment in Samarra
“The liquor, that is, the rye, was all about the same: most people bought drug store rye on prescriptions (the physicians who were club members saved 'scrips' for their patients), and cut it with alcohol and colored water. It was not poisonous, and it got you tight, which was all that was required of it and all that could be said for it.”
― John O'Hara, quote from Appointment in Samarra
“But William Dilworth English, M.D., was not thinking of the immediate punishment of his son; that was something which could be decided upon. He was not thinking of the glory of having a son who hopped freight trains. The thing that put him in the deep mood and gave him the heavy look that Julian saw on his face was that 'chip off the old block' refrain of Butch Doerflinger’s. William Dilworth English was thinking of his own life, the scrupulous, notebook honesty; the penny-watching, bill-paying, self-sacrificing honesty that had been his religion after his own father’s suicide. And that was his reward: a son who turned out to be like his grandfather, a thief.”
― John O'Hara, quote from Appointment in Samarra
“and nominally a cigar manufacturer. He never came to the club except on nights like this, when Mr. and Mrs. Ammermann would entertain a few of their—her—friends at a smaller table. Mildred, towering above Losch, the club steward, and pointing, daintily for her, with one finger as she held a small stack of place-cards in her left hand, apparently was one woman who had not heard about the business of the night before. It was axiomatic in Gibbsville that you could tell Mill Ammermann anything and be sure it wouldn’t be repeated; because Mill probably was thinking of the mashie-niblick approach over the trees to the second green. Julian derived some courage from her smile. He always had liked Mill anyway. He was fragmentarily glad over again that Mill did not live in New York, for in New York she would have been marked Lesbian on sight.”
― John O'Hara, quote from Appointment in Samarra
“He thought of these things. Harry must have changed since then, become obnoxious or something. Julian reasoned that he could not have asked the Harry he now knew to invest so much money in the business. Well, maybe the winter had something to do with it. You went to the Gibbsville Club for lunch; Harry was there. You went to the country club to play squash on Whit Hofman's private court, and Harry was around. You went to the Saturday night drinking parties, and there was Harry; inescapable, everywhere. Carter Davis was there, too, and so was Whit; so was Froggy Ogden. But they were different. The bad new never had worn off Harry Reilly. And the late fall and winter seemed now to have been spoiled by room after room with Harry Reilly. You could walk outside in the summer, but even though you can walk outside in winter, winter isn't that way. You have to go back to the room soon, and there is no life in the winter outside of rooms. Not in Gibbsville, which was a pretty small room itself.”
― John O'Hara, quote from Appointment in Samarra
John O'Hara
Born place: in Pottsville, Pennsylvania,, The United States
Born date January 31, 1905
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“If you can’t make a girl come why even bother? That always seemed to me to be like writing questions in a letter.”
― Bret Easton Ellis, quote from The Rules of Attraction
“I've never even been to Long Island”
― Meg Cabot, quote from Jinx
“However, Roméo Dallaire, the Canadian general in charge of the UN peacekeepers, refused to obey his orders to leave and remained with a couple hundred soldiers. He was a brave and moral man, but he was also alone in a sea of killers. We heard him often on the radio begging for someone, anyone, to send troops to Rwanda to stop the slaughter, but no one listened to him. Belgium, our country’s former colonial ruler, had been the first to pull its soldiers out of the country; meanwhile, the United States wouldn’t even acknowledge that the genocide was happening!”
― Immaculée Ilibagiza, quote from Left to Tell: Discovering God Amidst the Rwandan Holocaust
“These were the world’s first people. Everything they did, every action and decision, was entirely new, without precedent. They had no larger society to turn to, no examples of how to behave. They only had the Almighty to tell them right from wrong. And like all children, if His commands ran counter to their desires, sometimes they chose not to listen. And then they learned that there are consequences to one’s actions.”
― Helene Wecker, quote from The Golem and the Jinni
“She loved her lord or thought so, but that love Cost her an effort, which is a sad toil, The stone of Sisyphus, if once we move Our feelings ‘gainst the nature of the soil. She had nothing to complain of or reprove, No bickerings, no connubial turmoil; Their union was a model to behold, Serene and noble, conjugal, but cold.”
― George Gordon Byron, quote from Don Juan
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