“Historical, religious, and existential treatises suggest that for some persons at some times, it is rational not to avoid physical death at all costs. Indeed the spark of humanity can maximize its essence by choosing an alternative that preserves the greatest dignity and some tranquility of mind.”
― Norman Mailer, quote from The Executioner's Song
“but when the call came from Shirley Pedler to help in organizing the Utah Coalition Against the Death Penalty, she knew she would go out in the world again with her freaky blond hair, blond to everyone’s disbelief—at the age of fifty-four, go out in her denims and chin-length-hanging-down-straight vanilla hair to that Salt Lake world where nobody would ever make the mistake of thinking she was a native Utah lady inasmuch as Utah was the Beehive State. The girls went big for vertical hair-dos, pure monuments to shellac.”
― Norman Mailer, quote from The Executioner's Song
“He did a terrible thing and eliminating him would have left the world tidier. Or so goes the logic of the last fifty years of American justice. We throw away flawed people, people who have made terrible mistakes, with regularity and great alacrity. We jail drug dealers for decades, and we execute killers. We want them away. Out of sight.”
― Norman Mailer, quote from The Executioner's Song
“Brenda was six when she fell out of the apple tree.”
― Norman Mailer, quote from The Executioner's Song
“It was getting to be the best conversation she ever had. She had always thought the only way to have conversations like that was in your head. Then”
― Norman Mailer, quote from The Executioner's Song
“It was better than floods of misery that a son of her flesh had killed the sons of other mothers. That burned in her heart like the pain which flared in the arthritis of her knees. Pain was a boring conversationalist who never stopped, just found new topics. Bess”
― Norman Mailer, quote from The Executioner's Song
“Then the Warden said, “Do you have anything you’d like to say?” and Gary looked up at the ceiling and hesitated, then said, “Let’s do it.” That was it. The most pronounced amount of courage, Vern decided, he’d ever seen, no quaver, no throatiness, right down the line.”
― Norman Mailer, quote from The Executioner's Song
“Finally he said, “I like everything that wild Irish maniac, J. P. Donleavy, ever wrote.” It wasn’t so much a discussion as a sharing of taste. He also liked The Agony and the Ecstasy and Lust for Life by Irving Stone.”
― Norman Mailer, quote from The Executioner's Song
“When you start to open a door, the pressure has to be greatest in the beginning, yet the door moves the least.”
― Norman Mailer, quote from The Executioner's Song
“Gary Mark Gilmore: Go down on me, partner... I need it
Nicole Baker: Don't call me partner.
Gary Mark Gilmore: No, darlin'... I love it... I love it
Nicole Baker: Yeah, you and seven other motherfuckers.”
― Norman Mailer, quote from The Executioner's Song
Norman Mailer
Born place: in Long Branch, New Jersey, The United States
Born date January 31, 1923
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“Once you're out here in the world, nobody cares where you used to live. Who you are, that's what counts.”
― Jennifer R. Hubbard, quote from The Secret Year
“Do you have my pussy? Oh God, cat!
Do you have my cat?”
― M.A. Stacie, quote from Unwritten Rules
“Hush little owl,
You're with Twi.
I got the moves to get you by.
Big bad crows.
St. Aggie's scamps
Ain't got nothin to show the champ.
I'll pop a spiral
With a twist,
Do a three-sixty
And scatter mist----”
― Kathryn Lasky, quote from The Journey
“There are no new stories in the world anymore, and no more storytellers. There is nothing left but fragments of phrases that signaled their telling: once upon a time; why; and then; the end. But these phrases have lost their meanings through endless repetition, like everything else in this modern, mechanical age. And this machine age has no room for stories. These days we seek our pleasures out in single moments cast in amber, as if we have no desire to connect the future to the past. Stories? We have no time for them; we have no patience.”
― Dexter Palmer, quote from The Dream of Perpetual Motion
“We want to get there faster. Get where? Wherever we are not. But a human soul can only go as fast as a man can walk, they used to say. In that case, where are all the souls? Left behind. They wander here and there, slowly, dim lights flickering in the marshes at night, looking for us. But they're not nearly fast enough, not for us, we're way ahead of them, they'll never catch up. That's why we can go so fast: our souls don't weigh us down.”
― Margaret Atwood, quote from The Tent
The Crossover
The Lemonade Crime
Ariel: The Restored...
The Atlantis Gene
The Sound
MidwinterbloodBookQuoters 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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