Quotes from The Man With the Golden Arm

“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

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Popular quotes

“Hello, princess,” said Lord Maccon to the vampire.
“Got yourself into quite a pickle this time, didn't you?”
Lord Akeldama looked him up and down. “My sweet young naked boy, you are hardly one to talk. Not that I mind, of course.”
― Gail Carriger, quote from Soulless

“I realize that sometimes death comes before you expect it. That while we are rarely prepared for our friends, family and loved ones to die, we are never prepared for our own deaths. Never prepared to reconcile our own regrets.”
― Carrie Ryan, quote from The Forest of Hands and Teeth

“IF - and this is the greatest of them all - I had the courage to see myself as I reallyam, I would find out what is wrong with me, and correct it, then I might have a chance to profit by my mistakes and learn something from the experience of others,for I know that there is something WRONG with me, or I would now be where I WOULD HAVE BEEN IF I had spent more time analyzing my weaknesses, and less time building alibis to cover them.”
― Napoleon Hill, quote from Think and Grow Rich: The Landmark Bestseller Now Revised and Updated for the 21st Century

“As with other paired bracketing devices (such as parentheses, dashes and quotation marks), there is actual mental cruelty involved , incidentally, in opening up a pair of commas and then neglecting to deliver the closing one. The reader hears the first shoe drop and then strains in agony to hear the second. In dramatic terms, it's like putting a gun on the mantelpiece in Act I and then having the heroine drown herself quietly offstage in the bath during the interval. It's just not cricket. Take the example, 'The Highland Terrier is the cutest, and perhaps the best of all dog species.' Sensitive people trained to listen for the second comma (after 'best') find themselves quite stranded by that kind of thing. They feel cheated and giddy. In very bad cases, they fall over.”
― Lynne Truss, quote from Eats, Shoots & Leaves: The Zero Tolerance Approach to Punctuation

“Hey, Rosalie? Do you know how to drown a blonde? Stick a mirror to the bottom of a pool.”
― Stephenie Meyer, quote from Breaking Dawn

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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.