Billy O'Connor · 310 pages
Rating: (28 votes)
“I tried to drown my demons with whiskey, but I found out real devils can swim.”
― Billy O'Connor, quote from Confessions of a Bronx Bookie
“I skipped two short steps and walloped the back of his head with an energy-charged swing of the pipe. The street collided with his jaw.”
― Billy O'Connor, quote from Confessions of a Bronx Bookie
“The longer the wars, the younger the men who must finish them.”
― Billy O'Connor, quote from Confessions of a Bronx Bookie
“In Nam, the jungle's heat was heavy, and like a spoiled overweight child, it insisted on being carried everywhere.”
― Billy O'Connor, quote from Confessions of a Bronx Bookie
“I crashed the pipe murderously down onto his mouth and heard his upper teeth shatter at the gums.”
― Billy O'Connor, quote from Confessions of a Bronx Bookie
“The silence became palpable and merciless in its depths. The only sound came from my car’s radio. The Temptations towed me to tears.”
― Billy O'Connor, quote from Confessions of a Bronx Bookie
“The guys I owed were serious people. I was so busy raising cash; I barely had time to ignore my creditors.”
― Billy O'Connor, quote from Confessions of a Bronx Bookie
“My old man left Ireland's stone, green fields to migrate to the glass, concrete canyons of New York in 1950.”
― Billy O'Connor, quote from Confessions of a Bronx Bookie
Billy O'Connor
Born place: in County Cork, Ireland
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“I'm not absolutely certain of my facts, but I rather fancy it's Shakespeare -- or, if not, it's some equally brainy lad -- who says that it's always just when a chappie is feeling particularly top-hole, and more than usually braced with things in general that Fate sneaks up behind him with a bit of lead piping.”
― P.G. Wodehouse, quote from My Man Jeeves
“Smoke was a person with a sense of history. Do you know what I mean?" ...in truth, I DID know what she meant. Da Vinci, Martin Luther King, Jr., Genghis Kahn, Abraham Lincoln, Bette Davis - if you read their definitive biographies, you learned even when they were a month old, cooing in some wobbly crib in the middle of nowhere, they already had something historic about them. The way other kids had baseball, long division, Hot Wheels, and hula hoops, these kids had History and thus tended to be prone to colds, unpopular, sometimes plagued with a physical deformity (Lord Byron's clubfoot, Maugham's severe stutter, for example), which pushed them into exile in their heads. It was there they began to dream of human anatomy, civil rights, conquering Asia, a lost speech and being (within a span of four years) a jezebel, a marked woman, a little fox and an old maid.”
― Marisha Pessl, quote from Special Topics in Calamity Physics
“Such a storm of emotions as humans can evoke, all on the basis of imagination,” the dragon observed condescendingly. In a more reflective voice she asked, “Do you do this because you live such short lives? Tell yourselves wild tales of what might happen tomorrow, and feel all the feelings of events that will never happen? Perhaps to make up for the pasts you cannot recall, you invent futures that will not exist.”
― Robin Hobb, quote from Ship of Destiny
“Only incorrigible bohemians find it boring or laughable when a man of talent outgrows the libertine chrysalis stage and begins to perceive and express the dignity of the intellect, adopting the courtly ways of a solitude replete with bitter suffering and inner battles though eventually gaining a position of power and honor among men.”
― Thomas Mann, quote from Death in Venice
“Because you don't think I'm a bad person," he said. "And I don't want to prove you wrong.”
― V.E. Schwab, quote from Vicious
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