Political Novels

"Long after midnight old lonely trains called up to Mama like lovers forever arriving too late for love. Up from the long grieving river they called, past track and tower and dock, to windows long darkened and doorways long locked; old beaux that had walked Perdido Street long ago, returning to mourn the names of girls they had loved. They had plenty to spend and all night for loving. But the windows were darkened, the doors were locked, and the only girls whose names they knew had no name now but dust."

"The courts were against them, the police were against them, businessmen, wives, churches, press, politicians and their own panders were against these cork-heeled puppets. Now the missions were sending out sandwich men to advertise that Christ Himself was against them."

"The pianola roll whispered on and on, it had not happened to him before so heart-shakingly as this. / And the moon that could never wane dimmed down to no more than a gas lamp's leaning glow. Drinkers and dancers, gaffers and gamblers, all had gone. / Out in the sand and the Spanish Dagger, in chaparral-pea and honey-mesquite where under the thorn the horned toad waits, the prairie dog slept in his burrow. White bones bleached in the sun. Before the music was over; before the dancing was done. / And a little wind went searching in circles to ask, Where had those lovers gone before the dance was done? / All was well. They had breathed each other's breath. All was well: they had drunk of each other's lips. / All was well, for what was dust had when living been loved."

"All he recalled clearly was opening the door the next morning and seeing a veil of mist so blue it blurred the outlines of house, hill and tree. And as the morning warmed the whole big blue world began to smoke faintly. / Louisiana. / In the long afternoon the clouds stacked. And still, over it all, that pale shifting veil. / A real southland haze in which one sees whatever one wishes to see. A haze that seeps behind the eyes and makes a wish-dream of everything."

"Cotton grew, fruit grew, oil gushed a year and dried. Before it dried Fitz put in a year as a gaffer, made good money and found his girl. A girl who had thought herself rough enough. / Cotton failed, fruit failed – oil had spoiled the soil. It became a country of a single crop, and the crop was dust. Fifteen years of it did the girl in, feeling she'd had enough of oil."

"A walk on the wild side."

"YOU ARE NOW ENTERING ARROYO / Pop. 955 / A statistic that didn't include the Mexican woman whose residence was just far enough beyond it to keep her free of local taxes. Whose own way home, eleven months of twelve, was up a flight of careworn stairs to a room guarded only by the Virgin Mary. / Terasina Vidavarri slept within a double ruin. Within the wreck of her own hopes, inside what was left of the Hotel Crockett. The last guest had left and all along the long uncarpeted hall, the doors, like her own soul's door, were boarded on both sides. / [...] / ‘It is lucky to love any time, for then you have someone to live for,’ Terasina thought, ‘but if you are not in love that is lucky also. Because then you have no problem.’"

"‘Un-utter-uble sorrows is in store for all,’ he gave his holy word – a Santa Claus with nothing save horrors in his sack, hollowing every syllable to make Hell so imminent they could scarcely await their turn on the spit. ‘Un-utter-uble sorrows! Un-dying Damnation! Ut-ray-jus visi-tay-shuns! Invasion by an army! A army of lepers! [...]’ / Oh, they loved those leper mounties so they scarcely knew which side to join first. It didn't matter: no cause was too mad so long as the action was fast and the field bloody. Swept, they were swept by the enormous loneliness of their lives up to the very gates of the golden city, then swept clear back to the burning plains of Damnation. An action so fast it permitted no moment wherein to take breath and look within. To look within at their own hearts, so dark so empty just as hearts. [...] / ‘How about New York?’ some people never wanted to go anywhere alone. / ‘Buried in a rain of toads! Toads big as cats to Wall Street's topmost tower!’ / Wall Street had all the luck."

"Her breath began drawing slower, soot and sleep sealed her eyes. / Her face in sleep looked furtive yet innocent, like one already punished for a crime she hasn't grown up to commit. When she was old enough to commit it she'd find it."

"He felt her cold little lips and her small cold mouth, her little cold hands that felt so greedy. / ‘Daddy, you'll never have to work,’ Kitty Twist told Dove. ‘I'll work hard 'n give you all my money.’ / He couldn't see her smiling too knowingly in the dark. / [...] / ‘Red, what I'm trying to say is I'll hustle for you if want me to.’ / ‘I'll hustle for you too,’ he promised. / ‘My God,’ the girl thought, ‘he thinks I mean I'm going to be a shoe-clerk for him. I'm going to have to straighten him out till there's nothing left but kinks.’"

"‘Mister, I'll cook, I'll cuss, I'll mend yer socks, I'll stoke yer engines 'r catch you a damn whale barehand. [...]’ / ‘You do know that there is a seafaring man's union?’ He gave Dove the benefit of a serious doubt. / ‘Mister, I'm a Christian boy and don't truckle to Yankee notions. Put my name in your ship's dinner-pot and you're my captain, I'm your hand. Just tell me ever-what you want done and I'll 'tend it, for I'm bedcord strong. If I don't turn you out what in your eyes makes a fair day's work you can put me off at the first port of call. Aint that fair enough?’ / ‘Mighty fair, son. If more boys were willing to work for nothing there'd be just that many more millionaires.’"

"Three shots of corn likker and the whole stuffed zoo – Moose, Elks, Woodmen, Lions, Thirty-Third Degree Owls and Forty-Fourth Degree Field Mice begin to conspire against the very laws they themselves have written. / It was all right to take a slug of whiskey from your own flask in a taxi, but forbidden on a trolley-car. That didn't help those who rode trolley-cars. You couldn't carry liquor down the street, but if you owned a car you just bypassed that. For every statute they had a little loophole – that by coincidence fitted their own figures as if measured for them. Those who had no hand in writing statutes – panders and madams and such as that – had a harder time squeezing through. / It was an ancestral treachery that all do-righters practice."

"We shall come back, no doubt, to walk down the Row and watch young people on the tennis courts by the clump of mimosas and walk down the beach by the bay, where the driving floats lift gently in the sun, and on out to the pine grove, where the needles thick on the ground will deaden the football so that we shall move among trees as soundlessly as smoke. But that will be a long time from now, and soon now we shall go out of the house and go into the convulsion of the world, out of history into history and the awful responsibility of Time."

"Oh, I know he made mistakes," she said, and lifted up her chin as though facing something, "bad mistakes. Maybe he did bad things, like they say. But inside—in here, deep down—" and she laid her hand to her bosom—"he was a great man."

"[I]f you could not accept the past and its burden, there was no future, for without one there cannot be the other, and […] if you could accept the past you might hope for the future, for only out of the past can you make the future."

"I must believe that Willie Stark was a great man. What happened to his greatness is not the question. Perhaps he spilled it on the ground the way you spill a liquid when the bottle breaks. Perhaps he piled up his greatness and burnt it in one great blaze in the dark like a bonfire and then there wasn't anything but dark and the embers winking. Perhaps he could not tell his greatness from ungreatness and so mixed them together so that what was adulterated was lost. But he had it. I must believe that."

"Nothing fazed him, not insult or anger or violence or getting his face beat into a hamburger. He was a true businessman. He knew the value of everything."

"But if anything is for certain it is that no story is ever over, for the story which we think is over is only a chapter in a story which will not be over[.]"

"It might have been all different, Jack."

"[A]ll life is but the dark heave of blood and the twitch of the nerve."

"The subject of my future, as a matter of fact, was one on which I had never cared to dwell. I simply didn't care. I would think that I'd get a job, any kind of job, and do it and collect my pay and spend the pay and go back to the job on Monday morning, and that would be all. I had no ambitions."

"You live with words a long time. Then all at once you are old, and there are the things and the words don't matter"

"Well, I'm telling you something. You are the stinkingest louse God ever let live." I relished the moment of profound silence which followed, then plunged on, "And you think you can buy me in. Well, I know why you want to. You don't know how much I know or what. I was thick with the Boss and I know a lot. I'm the joker in the deck. My name is Jack and I'm the wild jack and I'm not one-eyed. You want to deal me to yourself from the bottom of the deck. But it's no sale, Tiny, it's no sale."

"For West is where we all plan to go someday. It is where you go when the land gives out and the old-field pines encroach. It is where you go when you get the letter saying: Flee, all is discovered. It is where you go when you look down at the blade in your hand and the blood on it. It is where you go when you are told that you are a bubble on the tide of empire. It is where you go when you hear that thar's gold in them-thar hills. It is where you go to grow up with the country. It is where you go to spend your old age. Or it is just where you go."

"[F]or when you get in love you are made all over again."

"A time comes when you think you cannot bear another thing, but it happens to you, and you can bear it."

"The person that loves you has picked you out of the great mass of uncreated clay which is humanity to make something out of, and the poor lumpish clay which is you wants to find out what it has been made into. But at the same time, you, in the act of loving somebody, become real, cease to be a part of the continuum of the uncreated clay and get the breath of life in you and rise up. So you create yourself by creating another person, who, however, has also created you, picked up the you-chunk of clay out of the mass. So there are two you's, the one you yourself create by loving and the one the beloved creates by loving you. The farther those two you's are apart the more the world grinds and grudges on its axis. But if you loved and were loved perfectly then there wouldn't be any difference between the two you's or any distance between them. They would coincide perfectly, there would be a perfect focus, as when a stereoscope gets the twin images on the card into perfect alignment."

"[Y]ou have to make the good out of the bad because that is all you have to make it out of."

"[T]he human being is a very complicated contraption and […] they are not good or bad but are good and bad and the good comes out of bad and the bad out of good[.]"

"[W]hatever you live is Life."

"The truth shall make you free."

"Boy," he said, "you work for me because I'm the way I am and you're the way you are. It is an arrangement founded on the nature of things." "That's a hell of a fine explanation." "It's not an explanation," he said, and laughed again. "There ain't any explanations. Not of anything. All you can do is point at the nature of things. If you are smart enough to see 'em."

"Cass Mastern lived for a few years and in that time he learned that the world is all of one piece. He learned that the world is like an enormous spider web and if you touch it however lightly, at any point, the vibration ripples to the remotest perimeter and the drowsy spider feels the tingle and is drowsy no more but springs out to fling the gossamer coils about you who have touched the web and then inject the black, numbing poison under your hide. It does not matter whether or not you meant to brush the web of things. Your happy foot or your gay wing may have brushed it ever so lightly, but what happens always happens and there is the spider, bearded black and with his great faceted eyes glittering like mirrors in the sun, or like God's eye, and the fangs dripping."

"An ambitious man is a man who wants other people to think he is great."

"It is human defect—to try to know oneself by the self of another."

"[N]othing happened to Jack Burden, for nothing ever happened to Jack Burden, who was invulnerable. Perhaps that was the curse of Jack Burden: he was invulnerable."

"For many cannot bear their eyes upon [Negroes], and enter into evil and cruel ways in their desperation."

"Her eyes were glittering like the eyes of a child when you give a nice surprise, and she laughed with a sudden throaty, tingling way. It is the way a woman laughs for happiness. They never laugh that way just when they are being polite or at a joke. A woman only laughs that way a few times in her life. A woman only laughs that way when something has touched her way down in the very quick of her being and the happiness just wells out as natural as breath and the first jonquils and mountain brooks. When a woman laughs that way it always does something to you. It does not matter what kind of face she has got either. You hear that laugh and feel that you have grasped a clean and beautiful truth. You feel that way because that laugh is a revelation. It is a great impersonal sincerity. It is a spray of dewy blossom from the great central stalk of All Being, and the woman's name and address hasn't got a damn thing to do with it. Therefore, that laugh cannot be faked. If a woman could learn to fake it she would make Nell Gwyn and Pompadour look like a couple of Campfire Girls wearing bifocals and ground-gripper shoes and with bands on their teeth. She could set all society by the ears. For all any man really wants is to hear a woman laugh like that."

"Life is a fire burning along a piece of string—or is it a fuse to a powder keg which we call God?—and the string is what we don't know, our Ignorance, and the trail of ash, which, if a gust of wind does not come, keeps the structure of the string, is History, man's Knowledge, but it is dead, and when the fire has burned up all the string, then man's Knowledge will be equal to God's Knowledge and there won't be any fire, which is Life. Or if the string leads to a powder keg, then there will be a terrific blast of fire, and even the trail of ash will be blown completely away."

"Life is Motion toward Knowledge. If God is Complete Knowledge then He is Complete Non-Motion, which is Non-Life, which is Death. Therefore, if there is such a God of Fullness of Being, we would worship Death, the Father."

"I'll draw you another picture. It is a picture of a man trying to paint a picture of a sunset. But before he can dip his brush the color always changes and the shape. Let us give a name to the picture which he is trying to paint: Knowledge. Therefore if the object which a man looks at changes constantly so that Knowledge of it is constantly untrue and is therefore Non-Knowledge, then Eternal Motion is possible. And Eternal Life. Therefore we can believe in Eternal Life only if we deny God, Who is Complete Knowledge."

"They say you are not you except in terms of relation to other people. If there weren't any other people there wouldn't be any you because what you do, which is what you are, only has meaning in relation to other people."

"There is nothing more alone than being in a car at night in the rain."

"[The law i]s like a single-bed blanket on a double bed and three folks in the bed and a cold night. There ain't enough blanket to cover the case, no matter how much pulling and hauling, and somebody is always going to nigh catch pneumonia. Hell, the law is like the pants you bought last year for a growing boy, but it is always this year and the seams are popped and the shankbone's to the breeze. The law is always too short and too tight for growing humankind. The best you can do is do something and then make up some law to fit and by the time that law gets on the books you would have done something different."

"[T]he story of Willie Stark and the story of Jack Burden are, in one sense, one story."

"[I]f you ask something quick and sharp out of a clear sky you may get an answer you never would get otherwise. If the person you ask has forgotten the thing, the quick, sharp question may spear it up from the deep mud, and if the person has not forgotten but does not want to tell you, the quick, sharp question may surprise the answer out of him before he thinks."

"Maybe the things you want are like cards. You don't want them for themselves, really, though you think you do. You don't want a card because you want the card, but because in a perfectly arbitrary system of rules and values and in a special combination of which you already hold a part the card has meaning. Then, even if you do know the rules, a card doesn't mean a thing. They all look alike."

"I looked out the window and saw that it was going to be another day, and shaved, and dressed, and went down to get a cup of coffee."

"But for the present I would lie there and know I didn't have to get up, and feel the holy emptiness and blessed fatigue of a saint after the dark night of the soul. For God and Nothing have a lot in common. You look either one of Them straight in the eye for a second and the immediate effect on the human constitution is the same."

"Yeah," I said, "I heard the speech. But they don't give a damn about that. Hell, make 'em cry, make 'em laugh, make 'em think you're their weak erring pal, or make 'em think you're God-Almighty. Or make 'em mad. Even mad at you. Just stir 'em up, it doesn't matter how or why, and they'll love you and come back for more. Pinch 'em in the soft place. They aren't alive, most of 'em, and haven't been alive in twenty years. Hell, their wives have lost their teeth and their shape, and likker won't set on their stomachs, and they don't believe in God, so it's up to you to give 'em something to stir 'em up and make 'em feel alive again. Just for half an hour. That's what they come for. Tell 'em anything. But for Sweet Jesus' sake don't try to improve their minds."