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Quotes from Superman Comes to the Supermarket — Norman Mailer

1923–2007 United States

← All quotes by Norman Mailer

21 quotes

It might be more difficult to be a President than it ever had before. Nothing less than greatness would do.

Superman Comes to the Supermarket (1960)

Mystery is an emotion which is repugnant to a political animal.

Superman Comes to the Supermarket (1960)

In tranquility one recollects them with affection, their instinct is good, crazy family good.

Superman Comes to the Supermarket (1960)

All too often men with physical courage are disappointing in their moral imagination.

Superman Comes to the Supermarket (1960)

The twentieth century may yet be seen as that era when civilized man and underprivileged man were melted together into mass man.

Superman Comes to the Supermarket (1960)

One can indeed be restored, by an exceptional demonstration of love.

Superman Comes to the Supermarket (1960)

One gets the impression that people come to Los Angeles in order to divorce themselves from the past, here to live or try to live in the rootless pleasure world of an adult child.

Superman Comes to the Supermarket (1960)

The need of the city is to accelerate growth; the pride of the small town is to retard it.

Superman Comes to the Supermarket (1960)

Why else lead a life of bad banquet dinners, cigar smoke, camp chairs, foul breath, and excruciatingly dull jargon if not to avoid the echoes of what is not known.

Superman Comes to the Supermarket (1960)

Politics quarantines one from history; most of the people who nourish themselves in the political life are in the game not to make history but to be diverted from the history which is being made.

Superman Comes to the Supermarket (1960)

Everyone from the meanest starving cripple to an ambitious young man could expand to the optimism of an improving future because the man offered an unspoken promise of a future which would be rich.

Superman Comes to the Supermarket (1960)

The excessive hysteria of the Red wave was no preparation to face an enemy, but rather a terror of the national self.

Superman Comes to the Supermarket (1960)

Eisenhower could stand as a hero only for that large number of Americans who were most proud of their lack of imagination.

Superman Comes to the Supermarket (1960)

Mysteries are irritated by facts.

Superman Comes to the Supermarket (1960)

Pompous words and long pauses which lay like a leaden pain over fever, the fever that one is in, over, or is it that one is just behind history?

Superman Comes to the Supermarket (1960)

There could be no politics which gave warmth to one's body until the country had recovered its imagination, its pioneer lust for the unexpected and incalculable.

Superman Comes to the Supermarket (1960)

James Farley. Huge. Cold as a bishop. The hell he would consign you to was cold as ice.

Superman Comes to the Supermarket (1960)

Kennedy's most characteristic quality is the remote and private air of a man who has traversed some lonely terrain of experience, of loss and gain, of nearness to death, which leaves him isolated from the mass of others.

Superman Comes to the Supermarket (1960)

Then vote for him the boss will if he must; he cannot be caught on the wrong side, but he does not feel the pleasure of a personal choice. Which is the center of the panic.

Superman Comes to the Supermarket (1960)

America is a nation of experts without roots; we are always creating tacticians who are blind to strategy and strategists who cannot take a step, and when the culture has finished its work the institutions handcuff the infirmity.

Superman Comes to the Supermarket (1960)

Attribution

Quotes and notes from Wikiquote: Norman Mailer (page history), available under CC BY-SA 4.0.