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

“Never rebel for the sake of rebelling, but always rebel for the sake of truth.” ― Criss Jami”
― Misty Griffin, quote from Tears of the Silenced: A True Crime and an American Tragedy; Severe Child Abuse and Leaving the Amish


“connection between skin color and sunlight. The results were as clear as the sky on a cloudless day—there was a near-constant correlation between skin color and sunlight exposure in populations that had remained in the same area for 500 years or more. They even produced an equation to express the relationship between a given population’s skin color and its annual exposure to ultraviolet rays. (If you’re feeling adventurous, the equation is W = 70-AUV/10. W represents relative whiteness and AUV represents annual ultraviolet exposure. The 70 is based on research that indicates that the whitest possible skin—the result of a population that received zero exposure to UV—would reflect about 70 percent of the light directed at it.)”
― Sharon Moalem, quote from Survival of the Sickest: A Medical Maverick Discovers Why We Need Disease


“There is no reason in principle why the question, what precisely happened at Easter, cannot be raised by any historian of any persuasion. Even if some Christians might wish to rule it off limits, they have (presumably) no a priori right to tell other historians, whether Muslims, Jews, Hindus, Buddhists, New Agers, gnostics, agnostics, or anyone else, what they may and may not study.”
― N.T. Wright, quote from The Resurrection of the Son of God


“If the decline of Christianity created the modern political zealot - and his crimes - so the evaporation of religious faith among the educated left a vacuum in the minds of Western intellectuals easily filled by secular superstition. There is no other explanation for the credulity with which scientists, accustomed to evaluating evidence, and writers, whose whole function was to study and criticize society, accepted the crudest Stalinist propaganda at its face value. They needed to believe; they wanted to be duped.”
― Paul Johnson, quote from Modern Times: The World from the Twenties to the Nineties


“I write not for sensation, but for Truth. I leave judgement to the hearts of my good Readers everywhere.”
― David Ebershoff, quote from The 19th Wife


Interesting books

Chosen
(201.6K)
Chosen
by P.C. Cast
The Jungle
(114.1K)
The Jungle
by Upton Sinclair
The Lost Symbol
(432.5K)
The Lost Symbol
by Dan Brown
A Court of Mist and Fury
(168.7K)
A Court of Mist and...
by Sarah J. Maas
East of Eden
(355.4K)
East of Eden
by John Steinbeck
Me Talk Pretty One Day
(537.9K)
Me Talk Pretty One D...
by David Sedaris

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.