36 quotes
Miracles prove nothing except to those whose faith is bought very cheap, sir.
The Yiddish Policemen’s Union (2007)
Every generation loses the messiah it has failed to deserve.
The Yiddish Policemen’s Union (2007)
He’s too superstitious not to see this as a bad omen, but when you're a pessimist, all omens are bad.
The Yiddish Policemen’s Union (2007)
He didn’t want to be what he wasn’t, he didn’t know how to be what he was.
The Yiddish Policemen’s Union (2007)
The rest of Sitka’s homicides are so-called crimes of passion, which is a shorthand way of expressing the mathematical product of alcohol and firearms.
The Yiddish Policemen’s Union (2007)
A Messiah who actually arrives is no good to anybody. A hope fulfilled is already half a disappointment.
The Yiddish Policemen’s Union (2007)
He doesn’t know how one proceeds under the circumstances, except with the certainty, pressed to the heart like a keepsake of love, that in the end nothing really matters.
The Yiddish Policemen’s Union (2007)
The daily sight of her is going to be a torment, like God torturing Moses with a glimpse of Zion from the top of Mount Pisgah every single day of his life.
The Yiddish Policemen’s Union (2007)
Anything good that I have written has, at some point during its composition, left me feeling uneasy and afraid. It has seemed, for a moment at least, to put me at risk.
There's nothing more embarrassing than to have earned the disfavor of a perceptive animal.
Wonder Boys (1995)
Every Messiah fails, writes Litvak, the moment he tries to redeem himself
The Yiddish Policemen’s Union (2007)
Her ankles were wobbling in her tall black pumps, and I saw that it could not be an easy thing to be a drunken transvestite.
Wonder Boys (1995)
A couple of years later I would marry her for a little while.
Wonder Boys (1995)
Where passion is married to intelligence, you may find genius, neurosis, madness or rapture.
The Mysteries of Berkeley (2002)
If Miss Sloviak were not already a transvestite, Crabtree would certainly make her into one.
Wonder Boys (1995)
Every writer has an ideal reader, I thought, and it was just my good luck that mine wanted to sleep with me.
Wonder Boys (1995)
The presence of evil, once scented, tends to bring out all that is most irrational and uncontrollable in the public imagination. It is a catalyst for pea-brained theories, gimcrack scholarship, and the credulous cosmologies of hysteria.
Undressing her was an act of recklessness, a kind of vandalism, like releasing a zoo full of animals, or blowing up a dam.
Wonder Boys (1995)
The whiskey tasted like bear steaks and river mud and the flesh of an oak tree. I had another swallow because it tasted so good.
Wonder Boys (1995)
He was a fugitive, lurking soul, James Leer. He didn't belong anywhere, but things went much better for him in places where nobody belonged.
Wonder Boys (1995)