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
“This book has two determinants: on the one hand, an ideological critique of the language of so-called mass culture; on the other, an initial semiological dismantling of that language: I had just read Saussure and emerged with the conviction that by treating “collective representations” as sign systems one might hope to transcend pious denunciation and instead account in detail for the mystification which transforms petit bourgeois culture into a universal nature.”
― Roland Barthes, quote from Mythologies
“Our one employee came warily out of the back. He was always skittish with me, and if Lizzy wasn't around, h made a point of keeping his distance. I think he was expecting me to make a pass at him. He was seventeen, had stringy black hair,bad skin, and probably weighed a buck five soaked wet. I didn't have the heart to tell him he wasn't my type.”
― Marie Sexton, quote from Promises
“My parents can take themselves off on a scenic tour of hell before they tell me who my friends will be,” Gan said pleasantly.”
― Mercedes Lackey, quote from Alta
“You gotta fish or cut bait,man.This has gone on long enough. You're playing with fire, every damn time you walk in this bar.”
― Karen Rose, quote from I Can See You
“You see, what I really want, and what I'm getting with Stephen, is the opportunity to rebuild myself from scratch. David's picture of me is complete now, and I'm pretty sure neither of us likes it much; I want to rip the page out and start again on a fresh sheet, just like I used to do when I was a kid and had messed a drawing up. It doesn't even matter who the fresh sheet is, really, so its beside the point whether I like Stephen, or whether he knows what to do with me in bed, or anything like that. I just want his rapt attention when I tell him that my favorite book is Middlemarch, and i just want that feeling, the feeling I get with him, of having not gone wrong yet”
― Nick Hornby, quote from How to Be Good
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