Quotes – Page 76 | Just Great DataBase

When she fucked up, all those years ago, just a little girl terrified into paralysis, she collapsed into the enigma of herself. And that could have happened to me, but I saw where it led for her. So I still believe in the Great Perhaps, and I can believe in it in spite of having lost her.

There is only that moment, and the incredible certainty that everything under the sun has been written by one hand only. It is the hand that evokes love, and creates a twin soul for every person in the world. Without such love, one’s dreams would have no meaning.

Remember that the best and greatest among mankind are those who do themselves no worldly good. Every successful man is more or less a selfish man. The devoted fail…

Maycomb was a tired old town, even in 1932 when I first knew it. Somehow, it was hotter then. Men’s stiff collars wilted by nine in the morning. Ladies bathed before noon after their three o’clock naps. And by nightfall were like soft teacakes with frosting from sweating and sweet talcum. The day was twenty-four hours long, but it seemed longer. There’s no hurry, for there’s nowhere to go and nothing to buy…and no money to buy it with.

Do you see the story? Do you see anything? It seems to me I am trying to tell you a dream–making a vain attempt, because no relation of a dream can convey the dream-sensation, that commingling of absurdity, surprise, and bewilderment in a tremor of struggling revolt, that notion of being captured by the incredible which is the very essence of dreams…

Like a running blaze on a plain, like a flash of lightning in the clouds. We live in the flicker.

I know there isn’t no beast—not with claws and all that, I mean—but I know there isn’t no fear, either.”Piggy paused.”Unless—”Ralph moved restlessly.”Unless what?””Unless we get frightened of people.

Until they become conscious, they will never rebel

I ain’t got no people. I seen the guys that go around on the ranches alone. That ain’t no good. They don’t have no fun. After a long time they get mean. They get wantin’ to fight all the time. . . ‘Course Lennie’s a God damn nuisance most of the time, but you get used to goin’ around with a guy an’ you can’t get rid of him.

And I stop listening to me, because to put it bluntly, I tire me.

The day was gray, the color of Europe.

But then, is there cowardice in the acknowledgment of fear? Is there cowardice in being glad that you lived?

One thing about whoring: It put a chicken on the table.

As you are now so once were we.

He was never without misery, and never without hope.

Ashes to ashes. Garage sale to garage sale, I said.

No one should be alone in their old age, he thought.

There must be something in books, things we can’t imagine, to make a woman stay in a burning house; there must be something there. You don’t stay for nothing.

Why do they never tell us that you are poor devils like us, that your mothers are just as anxious as ours, and that we have the same fear of death, and the same dying and the same agony—Forgive me, comrade; how could you be my enemy?

Well, here we are, Mr. Pilgrim, trapped in the amber of this moment. There is no why.