Quotes from Forever

Pete Hamill ·  613 pages

Rating: (9.8K votes)


“I don't know what that means. To truly live."
"To find work that you love, and work harder than other men. To learn the languages of the earth, and love the sounds of the words and the things they describe. To love food and music and drink. Fully love them. To love weather, and storms, and the smell of rain. To love heat. To love cold. To love sleep and dreams. To love the newness of each day.”
― Pete Hamill, quote from Forever


“Human beings want to know too much abut each other, and that's why there are so many lies.”
― Pete Hamill, quote from Forever


“To love women. To pleasure them, to make them laugh. To be foolish for them. To protect them. To respect them. To listen to them. They are life-givers. To live is to love them.”
― Pete Hamill, quote from Forever


“The boy admonished himself for wanting everything to be a story. And now realized that some journeys were not stories. On some journeys, nothing really happened. You just kept taking steps.”
― Pete Hamill, quote from Forever


“Cormac heard that glorious word for the first time in the1850s, and it came to epitomize for him all of New York's rough skepticism. It had much greater weight than the word 'horseshit.' Horseshit was flaky and without substance; it dried in the sun and was blown away in a high wind. Preachers were the master of horseshit. But bullshit was heavier, filled with crude truth, a kind of black cement. The voters knew the difference and they appreciated bullshit when practiced by a master. Any politician who used God in a speech was practicing horseshit. When he talked about building schools, getting water into Chatham Square, or lighting the darkest streets, Bill Tweed was practicing bullshit. If a third of the bullshit actually came into existence, their lives were made better. Tweed, as he moved up in the system, was a master of bullshit.”
― Pete Hamill, quote from Forever



“He looked at her for a long moment, as if remembering unfinished conversations, and then went back to place some damp, slow-burning turf on the fire.”
― Pete Hamill, quote from Forever


About the author

Pete Hamill
Born place: in Brooklyn, New York, The United States
Born date June 24, 1935
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“I am sad that I did not see any of this myself. By the time I had received the communication on television and in my morning paper, felt the tugging pull toward Manhattan, and made my preparations to migrate, I learned that the army ants had all died.

The Art Form simply disintegrated, all at once, like one of those exploding, vanishing faces in paintings by the British artist Francis Bacon

There was no explanation, beyond the rumored, unproved possibility of cold drafts in the gallery over the weekend. Monday morning they were sluggish, moving with less precision, dully. Then, the death began, affecting first one part and then another, and within a day all 2 million were dead, swept away into large plastic bags and put outside for the engulfment and digestion by the sanitation truck.

It is a melancholy parable. I am unsure of the meaning, but I do think it has something to do with all that plastic- that, and the distance from earth. It is a long, long way from the earth of a Central American jungle to the ground floor of a gallery, especially when you consider that Manhattan itself is suspended on a kind of concrete platform, propped up by a meshwork of wires, pipes, and water mains. But I think it was chiefly the plastic, which seems to me the most unearthly of all man's creations so far. I do not believe you can suspend army ants away from the earth, on plastic, for any length of time. They will lose touch, run out of energy, and die for lack of current.”
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