“Destiny is a good thing to accept when it's going your way. When it isn't, don't call it destiny; call it injustice, treachery, or simple bad luck.”
“But how can one be warm alone?”
“That's another thing that pisses me off about that Michelangelo statue of me in Florence. He's got me standing there uncircumcised! Who the fuck did he think I was?”
“It takes very little to make us [women] happy, and more than is contained in heaven and earth to keep us that way”
“Some Promised Land. The honey was there, but the milk we brought in with our goats. To people in California, God gives a magnificent coastline, a movie industry, and Beverly Hills. To us He gives sand. To Cannes He gives a plush film festival. We get the PLO. Our winters are rainy, our summers hot. To people who didn't know how to wind a wristwatch He gives underground oceans of oil. To us He gives hernia, piles, and anti-Semitism.”
“You’ve got to have a God. Without God, you might turn to something really crazy, like witchcraft, or religion.”
“First impressions die slowly, bad impressions take even longer”
“Moses has the Ten Commandments, it's true, but I've got much better lines - King David”
“Listen. The trees in this story are stirring, trembling, readjusting themselves. A breeze is coming in gusts off the sea, and it is almost as if the trees know, in their restlessness, in their head-tossing impatience, that something is about to happen.”
“Your neck smells like cheese,' I said.
'Oh,' He said, 'that's my cheese cologne. I have a whole selection. Chedder, American, Swiss.”
“Calcutta's the only city I know where you are actively encouraged to stop strangers at random for a quick chat.”
“I knew even then, the first time that I saw you, that I loved you.”
“Nothin very bad happen to me lately.
How you explain that? --I explain that, Mr
Bones,
terms o' your bafflin odd sobriety.
Sober as man can get, no girls, no telephones,
what could happen bad to Mr Bones?
--If life is a handkerchief sandwich,
in a modesty of death I join my father
who dared so long agone leave me.
A bullet on a concrete stoop
close by a smothering southern sea
spreadeagled on an island, by my knee.
--You is from hunger, Mr Bones,
I offers you this handkerchief, now set
your left foot by my right foot,
shoulder to shoulder, all that jazz,
arm in arm, by the beautiful sea,
hum a little, Mr Bones.
--I saw nobody coming, so I went instead.”
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