“Nobody's happy. What's happy? Happiness is over when the lights come on."
The older woman poured herself a glass of sangria. "Screw that," she said quietly.
"What?"
"Screw that. Wash your mouth out. Who taught you that half-assed existential drivel?”
― Armistead Maupin, quote from Tales of the City
“Mona knocked at the wrong time.
“Uh…yeah…wait a minute, Mona -- ”
Mona shouted through the door. “Room service, gentlemen. Just pull the covers up.”
Michael grinned at Jon. “My roommate. Brace yourself.”
Seconds later, Mona burst through the doorway with a tray of coffee and croissants.
“Hi! I’m Nancy Drew! You must be the Hardy Boys!”
― Armistead Maupin, quote from Tales of the City
“Garbage, you know, is very revealing.It beats the shit out of tarot cards.”
― Armistead Maupin, quote from Tales of the City
“Somepeople drink to foregt, I smoke to remember" Anna Madrigal in Tales of the City...”
― Armistead Maupin, quote from Tales of the City
“Down the Peninsula at Cypress Lawn Cemetery, a woman in a paisley turban climbed out of a battered automobile and trudged up the hillside to a new grave.
She stood there for a moment, humming to herself, then removed a joint from a tortoise-shell cigarette case and laid it gently on the grave.
"Have fun," she smiled. "It's Colombian.”
― Armistead Maupin, quote from Tales of the City
“Hey, you look at your tits; I'll look at mine! (Michael Tolliver, Tales of the City)”
― Armistead Maupin, quote from Tales of the City
“Mona … lots of things are more binding than sex. They last longer too.”
― Armistead Maupin, quote from Tales of the City
“We’re gonna be … I mean people like you and me … we’re gonna be fifty-year-old libertines in a world full of twenty-year-old Calvinists.”
― Armistead Maupin, quote from Tales of the City
“if you’re going to be degenerate, you might as well be a lady about it, don’t you think?”
― Armistead Maupin, quote from Tales of the City
“we’re gonna be fifty-year-old libertines in a world full of twenty-year-old Calvinists.”
― Armistead Maupin, quote from Tales of the City
“Could you conjugate that? To sleaze. I sleaze. You sleaze. We all have sleazen.”
― Armistead Maupin, quote from Tales of the City
“Well … everything gets old after a while. I personally get a little sick of wrecking my liver at The Lion for the privilege of tricking with some guy whose lover is in L.A. for the weekend.”
― Armistead Maupin, quote from Tales of the City
“Well … not exactly together. He’d buy a sofa and I’d buy a couple of matching chairs. One has to plan on divorce at all times … still, it was a landmark of sorts. I’d never gotten to the furniture-buying stage before.”
― Armistead Maupin, quote from Tales of the City
“Small world, huh?”
She grinned lewdly. “Not particularly. I’d say you’ve just run out of material.”
― Armistead Maupin, quote from Tales of the City
“There’s a theory,” said Anna, handing him a cup of tea as she climbed back into bed, “that we are all Atlanteans.” “Who?” “Us. San Franciscans.” Edgar grinned indulgently, bracing himself for another yarn. Anna caught it. “Do you want to hear it … or are you getting stuffy on me?” “Go ahead. Tell me a story.” “Well … in one of our last incarnations, we were all citizens of Atlantis. All of us. You, me, Frannie, DeDe, Mary Ann…” “Are you sure she’s out of the building?” “She’s gone to her switchboard. Will you relax?” “O.K. I’m relaxed.” “All right, then. We all lived in this lovely, enlightened kingdom that sank beneath the sea a long time ago. Now we’ve come back to this special peninsula on the edge of the continent … because we know, in a secret corner of our minds, that we must return together to the sea.” “The earthquake.” Anna nodded. “Don’t you see? You said the earthquake, not an earthquake. You’re expecting it. We’re all expecting it.” “So what does that have to do with Atlantis?” “The Transamerica Pyramid, for one thing.” “Huh?” “Don’t you know what dominated the skyline of Atlantis, Edgar … the thing that loomed over everything?” He shook his head. “A pyramid! An enormous pyramid with a beacon burning at the top!”
― Armistead Maupin, quote from Tales of the City
“The rules of a well-ordered life were never enough when other people refused to obey them.”
― Armistead Maupin, quote from Tales of the City
“Uh … you know, strict.” “With occasional lapses into lacto and ovo, huh?” “Yes. Except on weekends and nights when I’m stoned. Then I’m a steako-lacto-ovo … or maybe a porkchopo-lacto-ovo…”
― Armistead Maupin, quote from Tales of the City
“A half-hour conversation with Binky was like eating a Whitman Sampler in one sitting.”
― Armistead Maupin, quote from Tales of the City
“THERE WERE MORNINGS WHEN VINCENT FELT LIKE THE last hippie in the world. The Last Hippie. The phrase assumed a kind of tragic grandeur as he stood in the bathroom of his Oak Street flat, fluffing his amber mane to conceal his missing ear. If”
― Armistead Maupin, quote from Tales of the City
“In that time while he was still aware, which was the worse, I wonder: the agony of his physical torture or the horror of their utter hatred, of their moral certainty that he was so beyond the bounds of what they could accept that he deserved not just a death but one of such brutality, such inhumanity, as would make the seraphs who burned Sodom bow their heads in cold respect? What is it like, I wonder, to learn the full capacity of hatred in a lesson hammered home with bone broken on wood and skin ripped on barbed wire?”
― Hal Duncan, quote from Vellum
“When I look in the fridge, I see groceries, but I don't see food. My stomach growls; but there is no appetite.
Appetite and hunger are different. Appetite is the mental prompting that kicks the auto-response into drive so you actually reach out, take the food, put it in your mouth, chew, and swallow. I learned this in my first psychology course. Eating isn't just a physical need; it starts in the mind, generating hunger, which then should trigger the body to ingest food. I have no sparks between these plugs.”
― quote from Sickened: The Memoir of a Munchausen by Proxy Childhood
“That was what her parents did not understand—and had never understood—about stories. Liza told herself storied as though she was weaving and knotting an endless rope. Then, no matter how dark or terrible the pit she found herself in, she could pull herself out, inch by inch and hand over hand, on the long rope of stories.”
― Lauren Oliver, quote from The Spindlers
“Or to want to take a photo of Nicholas with his fangs out and wearing a black cape lined with red satin and then hang it over my pillow in a heart-shaped frame.”
― Alyxandra Harvey, quote from Bleeding Hearts
“Barefooted on the slick brick walk I rushed to where I could breathe in the cool breath from the interior of the springhouse. On a cold bubbling spring, covered dishes and crocks and pitchers of milk and butter and so on floated in a circle in the mild whirlpool, like horses on a merry-go-round, in the water that smelled of the mint that grew close by.”
― Eudora Welty, quote from One Writer's Beginnings
BookQuoters is a community of passionate readers who enjoy sharing the most meaningful, memorable and interesting quotes from great books. As the world communicates more and more via texts, memes and sound bytes, short but profound quotes from books have become more relevant and important. For some of us a quote becomes a mantra, a goal or a philosophy by which we live. For all of us, quotes are a great way to remember a book and to carry with us the author’s best ideas.
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