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
“It is always an accident that saves us. It is someone we have never seen.”
― James Salter, quote from Light Years
“Pain has a purpose. It makes us stronger. More compassionate. Able to love more deeply than we thought possible. If we let it, it makes us better people”
― D. Nichole King, quote from Love Always, Kate
“Or is it the case that no one gets over anything? Is there really that much pain and suffering continuing right now at this minute, in millions of hearts, in bodies carrying on the burden of existence, trying to smile through tears for fleeting, passing moments here and there-when they can forget what happened to them, maybe even for whole hours at a time? Maybe that's what it is to live.”
― Koethi Zan, quote from The Never List
“Paris became a star among the stars”
― Nicolas Barreau, quote from One Evening in Paris
“As if it were the task of every time to be just to everything before it! Ages and generations have never the right to be the judges of all previous ages and generations: only to the rarest men in them can that difficult mission fall. Who compels you to judge? If it is your wish—you must prove first that you are capable of justice. As judges, you must stand higher than that which is to be judged: as it is, you have only come later. The guests that come last to the table should rightly take the last places: and will you take the first? Then do some great and mighty deed: the place may be prepared for you then, even though you do come last.”
― Friedrich Nietzsche, quote from On the Use and Abuse of History for Life
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