“Love, is always insufficient, always a lie. Love, you are the clean shit of my soul. Stupid love, silly love. ”
― William Kennedy, quote from Ironweed
“. . . and what if I did drink too much? Whose business is that? Who knows how much I didn't drink?”
― William Kennedy, quote from Ironweed
“...the only brotherhood they belonged to was the one that asked that enduring question: How do I get through the next twenty minutes? They feared drys, cops, jailers, bosses, moralists, crazies, truth-tellers, and one another. they loved storytellers, liars, whores, fighters, singers, collie dogs that wagged their tails, and generous bandits. Rudy, thought Francis: he's just a bum, but who ain't?”
― William Kennedy, quote from Ironweed
“But after awhile you stand up, wipe the frost out of your ear, go someplace to get warm, bum a nickel for coffee, and then start walkin' toward somewheres else that ain't near no bridge.”
― William Kennedy, quote from Ironweed
“Why was it that suicide kept rising up in Francis' mind? Wake up in the weeds outside Pittsburgh, half frozen over, too cold to move, flaked out 'n' stiffer than a chunk of old iron, and you say to yourself: Francis, you don't ever want to put in another night, another mornin', like this one was. Time to go take a header off the bridge.
But after a while you stand up, wipe the frost out of your ear, go someplace to get warm, bum a nickel for coffee, and then start walkin' toward somewheres else that ain't near no bridge. ”
― William Kennedy, quote from Ironweed
“One never knows the potential within the human breast.”
― William Kennedy, quote from Ironweed
“He would not chance arrest by crawling into a corner of one of the old houses on Lower Broadway where the cops swept through periodically with their mindless net. What difference did it make whether four or six or eight lost men slept under a roof and out of the wind in a house with broken stairs and holes in the floors you could fall through to death, a house that for five or maybe ten years had been inhabited only by pigeons? What difference?”
― William Kennedy, quote from Ironweed
“Why the hell's he preachin' if he don't preach to people that need it?”
― William Kennedy, quote from Ironweed
“He lifted the picture for a closer look and saw himself among a group of men, tossing a baseball from bare right hand to gloved left hand. The flight of the ball had always made this photo mysterious to Francis, for the camera had caught the ball clutched in one hand and also in flight, arcing in a blur toward the glove. What the camera had caught was two instants in one: time separated and unified, the ball in two places at once, an eventuation as inexplicable as the Trinity itself. Francis now took the picture to be a Trinitarian talisman (a hand, a glove, a ball) for achieving the impossible: for he had always believed it impossible for him, ravaged man, failed human, to reenter history under this roof. Yet here he was in this acne of reconstitutable time, touching untouchable artifacts of a self that did not yet know it was ruined, just as the ball, in its inanimate ignorance, did not know yet that it was going nowhere, was caught.
But the ball is really not yet caught, except by the camera, which has frozen only its situation in space.
And Francis is not yet ruined, except as an apparency in process.
The ball still flies.
Francis still lives to play another day.
Doesn't he?”
― William Kennedy, quote from Ironweed
“Gerald, through an act of silent will, imposed on his father the pressing obligation to perform his final acts of expiation for abandoning the family. You will not know, the child silently said, what these acts are until you have performed them all. And after you have performed them you will not understand that they were expiatory any more than you have understood all the other expiation that has kept you in such prolonged humiliation. Then, when these final acts are complete, you will stop trying to die because of me.”
― William Kennedy, quote from Ironweed
William Kennedy
Born place: in Albany, New York, The United States
Born date January 16, 1928
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“The biggest mistake we can make is to think that we've figured the whole thing out. The people I know who are the greatest skeptics, who are least certain about how the world and the universe works, are also the most intelligent.... Absolute certainty is only for stupid people. It requires a certain intelligence for us to realize how little we actually know.”
― quote from The Last Good Man
“Sometimes our passion is our ruin.”
― Helen Humphreys, quote from The Lost Garden
“Regret at telling her about the dragon, about the words, settled into his gut. It left him feeling too exposed, like his nerves sat atop his skin.”
― Laura Kaye, quote from Hard as It Gets
“But pride carries its banner to the last; and fast as it is driven from one field unfurls it in another, never admitting that there is a shade less honor in the second field than in the first, or in the third than in the second; and so on till death.”
― Helen Hunt Jackson, quote from Ramona
“We share a reckless, toxic love that feeds the brokenness in me, in us. Our love is an addiction. A love that I won’t ever consider living without.”
― Angie McKeon, quote from Against All Odds
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