Quotes from The Man With the Golden Arm

Nelson Algren ·  464 pages

Rating: (2.2K votes)


“There's people in hell who want ice water.”
― Nelson Algren, quote from The Man With the Golden Arm


“He was falling between glacial walls, he didn't know how anyone could fall so far away from everyone else in the world. So far to fall, so cold all the way, so steep and dark between those morphine-coloured walls...”
― Nelson Algren, quote from The Man With the Golden Arm


“If Jesus Christ treated me like you do, I’d drive in the nails myself.”
― Nelson Algren, quote from The Man With the Golden Arm


“Then the wooden benches along the walls, where so many outcasts had slept, would be lit by a sort of slow, clocked lightning til the bulb steadied and fastened its tiny feral fury upon the center of the room like a single sullen and manic eye. To burn on there with a steady hate. Til morning wearied and dimmed it away to nothing more than some sort of little old lost gray child of a district-station moon, all its hatred spent.”
― Nelson Algren, quote from The Man With the Golden Arm


“For way down there, in a shot glass's false bottom, everything was bound to turn out fine after all.”
― Nelson Algren, quote from The Man With the Golden Arm



“I couldn't buy the lice off a sick cat," the cabbie answered from the very depths of self-deprecation.”
― Nelson Algren, quote from The Man With the Golden Arm


“Heroin got the drive awright-but there’s not a tingle to a ton-you got to get M to get the tingle-tingle.”
― Nelson Algren, quote from The Man With the Golden Arm


About the author

Nelson Algren
Born place: in Michigan, The United States
Born date March 28, 1909
See more on GoodReads

Popular quotes

“La mayoría de mis compras de muebles fueron estanterías. La mayoría de mis otras compras fueron libros.”
― Steven Gould, quote from Jumper


“These mages," Kol asked, a wicked glint in his eye, "what kind of fees will they charge? Will I get a two-for-one discount, since they're twins?”
― Tamora Pierce, quote from Cold Fire


“Sarah learnt a lot from Alex. Like the way men could say one thing, then another, then act in a way inconsistent with both positions and somehow still be convinced of their own integrity.”
― Emily Maguire, quote from Taming the Beast


“Girls were like that, though- they had to know things. They had to plan.”
― Cecily von Ziegesar, quote from It Had to Be You


“All her violence had drained away, replaced by a fear older and deeper than anything she'd ever experienced. An old, old recognition. Something inside her knew him from a time when girls took skin bags to the river to get water, a time when panthers walked in the darkness outside mud huts. From a time before electric lights, before candles, when darkness was fended off with stone lamps. When darkness was the greatest danger of all.”
― L.J. Smith, quote from The Hunter


Interesting books

Please Kill Me: The Uncensored Oral History of Punk
(23.6K)
Please Kill Me: The...
by Legs McNeil
Shopgirl
(33.3K)
Shopgirl
by Steve Martin
The Big Money
(2K)
The Big Money
by John Dos Passos
Too Big to Fail: The Inside Story of How Wall Street and Washington Fought to Save the Financial System from Crisis — and Themselves
(29.4K)
Too Big to Fail: The...
by Andrew Ross Sorkin
The Return of Rafe MacKade
(9.9K)
The Return of Rafe M...
by Nora Roberts
New York Dead
(11.3K)
New York Dead
by Stuart Woods

About BookQuoters

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.

We thoughtfully gather quotes from our favorite books, both classic and current, and choose the ones that are most thought-provoking. Each quote represents a book that is interesting, well written and has potential to enhance the reader’s life. We also accept submissions from our visitors and will select the quotes we feel are most appealing to the BookQuoters community.

Founded in 2023, BookQuoters has quickly become a large and vibrant community of people who share an affinity for books. Books are seen by some as a throwback to a previous world; conversely, gleaning the main ideas of a book via a quote or a quick summary is typical of the Information Age but is a habit disdained by some diehard readers. We feel that we have the best of both worlds at BookQuoters; we read books cover-to-cover but offer you some of the highlights. We hope you’ll join us.