Richard Fariña · 352 pages
Rating: (2.5K votes)
“god, they say, is love. and some one's got to pass the word.”
― Richard Fariña, quote from Been Down So Long it Looks Like Up to Me
“The conscience of my elusive race gives not a fig for me, baby. But I endure, if you know what I mean.”
― Richard Fariña, quote from Been Down So Long it Looks Like Up to Me
“Been down so long it looks like up to me” is NOT a quote from Richard Fariña. It his the title of his novel. It is, in fact a quote from the 1928 blues song "I Will Turn Your Money Green".
Doesn't anybody vett these things?”
― Richard Fariña, quote from Been Down So Long it Looks Like Up to Me
“All about them the golden girls, shopping for dainties in Lairville. Even in the midst of the wild-maned winter's chill, skipping about in sneakers and sweatsocks, cream-colored raincoats. A generation in the mold, the Great White Pattern Maker lying in his prosperous bed, grinning while the liquid cools. But he does not know my bellows. Someone there is who will huff and will puff. The sophmores in their new junior blazers, like Saturday's magazines out on Thursday. Freshly covered textbooks from the campus store, slide rules dangling in leather, sheathed broadswords, chinos scrubbed to the virgin fiber, starch pressed into straight-razor creases, Oxford shirts buttoned down under crewneck sweaters, blue eyes bobbing everywhere, stunned by the android synthesis of one-a-day vitamins, Tropicana orange juice, fresh country eggs, Kraft homogenized cheese, tetra-packs of fortified milk, Cheerios with sun-ripened bananas, corn-flake-breaded chicken, hot fudge sundaes, Dairy Queen root beer floats, cheeseburgers, hybrid creamed corn, riboflavin extract, brewer's yeast, crunchy peanut butter, tuna fish casseroles, pancakes and imitation maple syrup, chuck steaks, occasional Maine lobster, Social Tea biscuits, defatted wheat germ, Kellogg's Concentrate, chopped string beans, Wonderbread, Birds Eye frozen peas, shredded spinach, French-fried onion rings, escarole salads, lentil stews, sundry fowl innards, Pecan Sandies, Almond Joys, aureomycin, penicillin, antitetanus toxoid, smallpox vaccine, Alka-Seltzer, Empirin, Vicks VapoRub, Arrid with chlorophyll, Super Anahist nose spray, Dristan decongestant, billions of cubic feet of wholesome, reconditioned breathing air, and the more wholesome breeds of fraternal exercise available to Western man. Ah, the regimented good will and force-fed confidence of those who are not meek but will inherit the earth all the same.”
― Richard Fariña, quote from Been Down So Long it Looks Like Up to Me
“this is a nervous little decade we’re playing with”
― Richard Fariña, quote from Been Down So Long it Looks Like Up to Me
Richard Fariña
Born place: in Brooklyn, New York, The United States
Born date March 8, 1937
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“She had learnt a painful lesson, she thought – that as they die, the ones we love, we lose our witnesses, our watchers, those who know and understand the tiny little meaningless patterns, those words drawn in water with a stick. And there is nothing left but the endless flow.”
― Anne Rice, quote from The Witching Hour
“Are you sleeping with anyone?”
The question was asked so casually it took a second to process what he’d said.
I inhaled sharply. “Why is that any business of yours?”
He looked at me and I saw what I’d seen the first time we’d met—tremendous power and steely control. Both of which had me taking an involuntary step back. Again. At least I didn’t fall this time; I was making progress.
“Because I want to fuck you, Eva. I need to know what’s standing in my way, if anything.”
― Sylvia Day, quote from Bared to You
“Like all weak men he laid an exaggerated stress on not changing one's mind.”
― W. Somerset Maugham, quote from Of Human Bondage
“The heaviest penalty for declining to rule is to be ruled by someone inferior to yourself.”
― Plato, quote from The Republic
“But the future must be met, however stern and iron it be. ”
― Elizabeth Gaskell, quote from North and South
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