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
“Remember that I’m still a monster. I can listen to you scream and cry and beg and I still won’t let you out.”
― Holly Black, quote from The Coldest Girl in Coldtown
“Then, in the spirit of benevolence, "Your face is well balanced." She slapped him encouragingly on the back, "You have very long eyelashes. Like a cow.”
― C.S. Pacat, quote from Captive Prince: Volume Two
“There are a lot of human experiences that challenge the limits of our language,” she said. “That’s one of the reasons that we have poetry.”
― Ava Dellaira, quote from Love Letters to the Dead
“This is my attempt to make sense of the period that followed, weeks and then months that cut loose any fixed idea I had ever had about death, about illness, about probability and luck, about good fortune and bad, about marriage and children and memory, about grief, about the ways in which people do and do not deal with the fact that life ends, about the shallowness of sanity, about life itself. I have been a writer my entire life. As a writer, even as a child, long before what I wrote began to be published, I developed a sense that meaning itself was resident in the rhythms of words and sentences and paragraphs, a technique for withholding whatever it was I thought or believed behind an increasingly impenetrable polish. The way I write is who I am, or have become, yet this is a case in which I wish I had instead of words and their rhythms a cutting room, equipped with an Avid, a digital editing system on which I could touch a key and collapse the sequence of time, show you simultaneously all the frames of memory that come to me now, let you pick the takes, the marginally different expressions, the variant readings of the same lines. This is a case in which I need more than words to find the meaning. This is a case in which I need whatever it is I think or believe to be penetrable, if only for myself.”
― Joan Didion, quote from The Year of Magical Thinking
“My companion at the press drank every day a pint before breakfast, a pint at breakfast with his bread and cheese, a pint between breakfast and dinner, a pint at dinner, a pint in the afternoon about six o’clock, and another when he had done his day’s work.”
― Benjamin Franklin, quote from The Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin
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