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
“nothing ever goes away until it has taught us what we need to know
…nothing ever really attacks us except our own confusion. perhaps there is no solid obstacle except our own need to protect ourselves from being touched. maybe the only enemy is that we don’t like the way reality is now and therefore wish it would go away fast. but what we find as practitioners is that nothing ever goes away until it has taught us what we need to know. if we run a hundred miles an hour to the other end of the continent in order to get away from the obstacle, we find the very same problem waiting for us when we arrive. it just keeps returning with new names, forms, manifestations until we learn whatever it has to teach us about where we are separating ourselves from reality, how we are pulling back instead of opening up, closing down instead of allowing ourselves to experience fully whatever we encounter, without hesitating or retreating into ourselves.”
― Pema Chödrön, quote from When Things Fall Apart: Heart Advice for Difficult Times
“So sometimes what takes you down can be used to raise you up again.”
― Laura Wiess, quote from Leftovers
“Adelia, you must not quail. You are confounding inhumanity.”
― Ariana Franklin, quote from Mistress of the Art of Death
“Jackie patted her on the shoulder, "you know what you need?"
Ash peeked out from between her fingers."Eight hours of rest before tomorrows exam? Bug spray that repels assholes?”
― Karsten Knight, quote from Wildefire
“The lexicon of language, then, is a finite set of terms that by metaphor is able to stretch out over an infinite set of circumstances, even to creating new circumstances thereby.”
― Julian Jaynes, quote from The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind
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.