James Purdy · 300 pages
Rating: (257 votes)
“Some people confess in the flesh, others on paper.”
― James Purdy, quote from Eustace Chisholm and the Works
“Why, if Daniel Haws was to take out his naked cock and shake it in your face, you’d die of apoplexy.”
― James Purdy, quote from Eustace Chisholm and the Works
“Mexican marijuana, which he called the schoolboy’s consolation.”
― James Purdy, quote from Eustace Chisholm and the Works
“Amos, talk about pearls for teeth ... you got ‘em. No wonder the boys go for you, because I could too and if I had something to push between those pearly teeth I’d be first in line.”
― James Purdy, quote from Eustace Chisholm and the Works
“It was paper, as he had once joked to Amos, that he was really queer for.”
― James Purdy, quote from Eustace Chisholm and the Works
“One fine day you’ve got to give your body to somebody, or turn into a fully-fledged zombie.”
― James Purdy, quote from Eustace Chisholm and the Works
“Carla had the American woman’s fixed idea that love can cure, love can heal, love can bind a flowing wound.”
― James Purdy, quote from Eustace Chisholm and the Works
“She made no point of concealing the truth, for the truth was all she could bear now.”
― James Purdy, quote from Eustace Chisholm and the Works
“Ace sat down and inflated his cheeks like the wind gods in Italian paintings.”
― James Purdy, quote from Eustace Chisholm and the Works
“Most people have their buttons,” Eustace continued.”
― James Purdy, quote from Eustace Chisholm and the Works
“There was the cruel kind of Eustace silence.”
― James Purdy, quote from Eustace Chisholm and the Works
“Maureen had been born with the face of a gargoyle on the body of a sylph.”
― James Purdy, quote from Eustace Chisholm and the Works
“One morning while drinking coffee with Amos, Daniel Haws looked up suddenly, as if feeling the boy’s eyes on him, and said:
“Tryin’ to burn holes starin’ like that?”
“Guess I was just resting my eyes on you so as not to look at your wallpaper,” Amos gave a sour apology.
Daniel closed the book he was reading, a volume of Rhodes’s history of the United States, and took a careful look at the kitchen wallpaper.
“Yes,” he admitted, “that wallpaper is goddam ancient.”
― James Purdy, quote from Eustace Chisholm and the Works
James Purdy
Born place: in Hicksville, Ohio, The United States
Born date July 17, 1914
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“Legally, Moosbrugger's case could be summed up in-a sentence. He
was one of those borderline cases in law and forensic medicine
known even to the layman as a case of diminished responsibility.
These unfortunates typically suffer not only substandard health
but also have a substandard disease, Nature has a peculiar prefer-
ence for producing such people in droves. Natura non fecit saltus,
she makes no jumps but prefers gradual transitions; even on the
grand scale she keeps the world in a transitional state between imbe-
cility and sanity.”
― Robert Musil, quote from The Man Without Qualities
“And in its sky was such a sun as no opium eater could ever have imagined in his wildest dreams. Too hot to be white, it was a searing ghost at the frontiers of the ultraviolet, burning its planets with radiations which would be instantly lethal to all earthly forms of life. For millions of kilometers around extended great veils of gas and dust, fluorescing in countless colors as the blasts of ultraviolet tore through them. It was a star against which Earth’s pale sun would have been as feeble as a glowworm at noon.”
― Arthur C. Clarke, quote from Childhood's End
“Lately, I feel like my life is a book written in a language I don't know how to read.”
― Brandon Sanderson, quote from The Hero of Ages
“I just look at her and she creeps me out. She looks like she would eat a baby. Not that she's fat. She just looks hungry in some dangerous way that can't be explained. She's always so nice and friendly. Exactly the disposition of a baby killer.”
― Augusten Burroughs, quote from Running with Scissors
“A man should be resigned to knowing himself a little better each day if he hasn't got the guts to put an end to his sniveling once and for all.”
― Louis-Ferdinand Céline, quote from Journey to the End of the Night
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