Unknown

"Do your worst, you little bastards! Kill me! Do it! Do iiiiiaaaauuugghh!"

"Oh, th-there's no need to do that, Beth. Regular pancakes are fine."

"Cape Fear! Cape Fear! I-I'm doing – I'm – I'm going to do, like, from Cape Fear—"

"I guess that makes two of us."

"All right, Morty, thank you very much. We got one screw turn, and two screw turns, and—"

"Hey, someone's been spending too much time around glowing rocks, am I right?"

"My life is a fucking joke!"

"He's got it! That's a lower handicap stroke!"

"Morty, please. I love you, sweetheart."

"Ooh! Nice!"

"I smell the blood of—"

"All right, everybody! Two parts plutonic quartz... one part cesium... A-And listen, I'm sorry for yelling earlier, I-I-I couldn't ask for a better staff. I love you guys and I love all your families. And the final ingredient..."

"Get off! Gaaaggghhh!"

"It's okay! It's okay! Just go! Tell my family I love them! They may be hard to find 'cause my wife kept her last name and she made the kids take it too so I dunno you can Goo—"

"Take me to Morty! You're not Morty! [Jerry: No, I'm Mr. Crowbar. And this is my friend, who is also a crowbar!] That's... stupid."

"Oh wait, there is an autopilot! Wait! It's okay, never mind! I wanted to sacrifice myself anywaaaaay!"

"Oh wow, Baby Wizard was a parasite? He set me up with my wife!"

"Sure thing, Rick. Here's a screwdriver."

"I hear ya, Morty! Back in Brooklyn, we got a sayin': "We're walkin' here!""

"My name is AlexanDAAAUUUGGGHHH—"

"(to Ozen) That wound proves that your mind has repelled the Abyss. An undeniable proof. Ozen the Immovable. An actual white whistle. Hey, would you be my mentor?"

"(describing Lyza) A heavy drinker, quick to get into fights, always going too far with pranks, and you could never tell how honest she was being. On top of that, she had a brutally unbalanced diet. If she weren't a whistle, she would just be a regular weirdo...Really, she was quite a handful."

"(to Ozen) Ozen. If she [Riko] ever wanted to reach the bottom again and confronted you. I want you to tell her. Tell her what a miracle it is that she can move. Teach her how to brave the wonderful adventures waiting for her afterwards."

"(to Riko and Reg) I am Bondrewd. Delver of the Abyss. The Lord of Dawn, as some people call me."

"Thank you Mitty, for pulling Reg's Treasure up out of that place"

"I want to become a White Whistle soon so I can catch up to my mother...and explore the places she went."

"Irredeemable!"

"You're saying as if a family can only be made with blood relations. I do not think that is the case. A compassionate heart is what makes people a family. Blood does not help much in that regard. Love. It's love, Nanachi."

"nnaaaaaaaaa.. /////////"

"Dreams are stronger than poison and seize more firmly than disease, once captured one can not escape. It's a real curse, but for adventurers who are dedicated to it, body and soul, people without dreams are more frightening than death"

"Longing seizes people more powerfully than poison and more deeply than illness. Once it catches hold of you, there is absolutely no escape. This is quite a "curse," and yet the adventurers all willingly devote themselves to its pursuit. For them, a life without longing is more terrifying than death itself."

"So that flowers may bloom with innumerable deaths providing their nourishment, there are countless tragedies buried at the bottom of this beautiful world. But unless you are one of those directly concerned, this is not something you can know. You should simply be captivated by the utterly dazzling beauty and push on; treading firmly on the ground below. For your tragedy, too, is sure to become sustenance and give birth to the blooming of new flowers..."

"(to Nanachi) May your journey overflow with curses and blessing."

"Now I'm gonna cut you, 'cause my family's rich!"

"Aw hell no, dawg! You know me, I'm just trying—"

"The jig is up! Get me–get me out here! Get me out here!"

"I take very good care of myself. Growing up as a dancer, you know your body so well, you know what to do to overcome something. … I was raised really, really healthy, pretty much vegetarian and a very clean lifestyle, I don't smoke, I don't drink. I'm more addicted to the things that make me feel good — endorphins after working out."

"One of the issues with animals that I'm really concerned about is people who get animals as pets and maybe aren't prepared to take care of them and haven't really thought it through. I've seen a lot of people I know who get dogs and they can't handle them two days later … [Fur] is a really easy thing to avoid, you don't need fur and if you want the look of fur, I mean, there’s faux fur. There's just no reason for it. I just make a point of telling people that I don't buy products that are fur … I have a fragrance line and one of the things I really love about is the manufacturer assured me that nothing's tested on animals … I mean, how many years have we been selling cosmetics in this country? We should be able to figure out what we can use on humans safely and what no."

"Algren achieved all this in a lush language at once immediate and vernacular, but steeped in the tradition of his culture's greatest writers: the poetry of his sentences harked back to Whitman; his wry humour and vernacular power to Twain; his novelistic largeness to Melville; his pained humanity to Fitzgerald. [...] He was a naturalist who wrote unnaturalistic prose; an absurdist whose work reeked of reality; a realist whose best effects are often comic, a determined stylist who in the end believed passion mattered more than style; a passionate writer who fully understood that the measure of great writing was in its capacity to escape the writer's intentions, politics and passions."

"Dove Linkhorn, Kitty Twist, Legless Schmidt, Oliver Finnerty, Reba, Hallie and all those Algren calls "the broken men and breaking ones; wingies, dingies, zanies and lop-sided kukes; cokies and queers and threadbare whores" are all in search of America, only for the reader to discover that they are America."

"It shouldn't surprise me that Nelson Algren, clearly one of the best novelists of his time, is not much read these days. It's the "kill the messenger" syndrome, I suppose, for the news that Algren's works brings us is not good news: if the world he describes is at all like our own, then it's not morning in America, and it hasn't been for a long, long time. [...] In A Walk on the Wild Side it's the early Depression, east Texas and New Orleans, old Perdido Street; his characters are pimps and prostitutes, con men, drug addicts and alcoholics, homeless wanderers, illiterate whites and blacks trying to "make an honest dollar in a crooked sort of way.""

"‘If God made anything better than a girl,’ Dove thought, ‘He sure kept it to Himself.’ / That was all long ago in some brief lost spring, in a place that is no more. In that hour that frogs begin and the scent off the mesquite comes strongest."

"A Walk on the Wild Side, which Algren at times seemed to think little of, is to my mind an American classic, a home-grown version of the European Bildungsroman, to be read alongside Huckleberry Finn, The Red Badge of Courage and Native Son."

"Because A Walk on the Wild Side is a permanent part of our literature, these people, who continue to live among us, will continue to be heard. That's all Nelson ever wanted his work to accomplish, and what writer could want more?"

"‘More shameful things are worn by women on the open street these days than were worn in brothels a few years ago,’ the old man went on and on. And there was nobody to ask him how did he know what had been worn in brothels a few years ago. / ‘Even our little girls are turned out into the streets almost naked, inviting God's judgement on sin black as Sodom! Are we willing to pay the price?’ he asked, and answered his own question, ‘When it comes to God dealing with a nation's sin, there are no dollar days. Are we willing to pay the price?’ / They stared up at him indifferently. If they had the price of anything they would be in the movie or brothel, that look told."

"‘I feel like I been everywhere God got land,’ Dove thought, ‘yet all I found was people with hard ways to go. All I found was troubles 'n degradation. All I found was that those with the hardest ways of all to go were quicker to help others than those with the easiest ways. All I found was two kinds of people. Them that would rather live on the loser's side of the street with the other losers than to win off by theirselves; and them who want to be one of the winners even though the only way left for them to win was over them who have already been whipped. / ‘All I found was men and women, and all the women were fallen. Sports of the world, poor bummies, poor tarts, all they were good for was to draw flies I was told. You could always treat one too good, it was said, but you never could treat one too bad. Yet I wouldn't trade off the worst of the lot for the best of the other kind. I think they were the real salt of the earth.’"

"In the mixed-up April of '32 the numbers of jobless rose to eight millions, two hundred thousand steelworkers took a fifteen percent wage cut and it took a cardinal to perceive that the country's economic collapse was actually a wonderful piece of luck, for every day it brought thousands closer to the poverty of Christ, who had been nowhere near before. For thousands it was the chance of a lifetime to bring Jesus' simplicity, the cardinal said, right into the home. All over the country men and women and even small children began taking advantage of this spiritual opportunity. All manner of little goodies like that were lying about in the mixed-up April of '32."

"Nelson Algren's life is terrifying in its proof that talent, love and a determination to speak truth to power can destroy a writer as surely as mediocrity and compromise. A Walk on the Wild Side, the last of Algren's novels to be published in his lifetime, is in consequence a most moving achievement."

"There, in Dockery's Dollhouse [...] a straight-haired flat-chested hard-of-eye hustler called Tough Kitty was trying to get credit for just one little beer. / But the bartender, acting as oddly as , didn't seem to hear. / [...] / So she drew from the pocket of her faded blue jeans a small change-purse and emptied it on the bar: twelve pennies and one nickel. / ‘I got enough for a beer,’ she took count, ‘but not enough to get drunk on.’ And looked left-out of everything."

"All of the inmates of Tank Ten were white. At night they heard laughter from the Negro tier one flight above, and most of the trusties were short-term Negroes. Murphy insisted it was his influence that kept the tank lily white, but Dove suspected privately that the authorities had something to do with it."