Mark Winegardner > Quotes

“It's hell when the person you know you are isn't the person people see when they look at you.”
― Mark Winegardner, The Godfather Returns

“It's the Cuyahoga River that puts the cleave in Cleveland, separating East from Midwest, integration from segregation, a place that sees itself as America's westernmost Eastern city from a place that sees itself as the easternmost midwestern city. The rest of the country sees it as neither, though it must be said that the rest of the country is perversely wont to misunderstand Cleveland.”
― Mark Winegardner

“Kay both did and didn't want to ask whose boathouse this was. What stopped her wasn't fear of the answer. It was fear of Michael not wanting to be asked.”
― Mark Winegardner, The Godfather Returns

“I can’t swim farther than from here to the far side of a whiskey glass.”
― Mark Winegardner, The Godfather Returns

“He’d always been a man who followed his head and not his heart. The heart was just a bloody motor. The head was meant to drive.”
― Mark Winegardner, The Godfather Returns

“Ideas,” Hagen said, “are shit. It’s knowing what to do with an idea that matters.”
― Mark Winegardner, The Godfather Returns

“Fredo’s vagueness was born of ignorance, not discretion. Roth”
― Mark Winegardner, The Godfather Returns

“There has never in human history been a culture where optimism and cynicism existed side by side on such a scale as this, not even ancient Rome.”
― Mark Winegardner, The Godfather's Revenge

“The trick with women is knowing when to just let them talk.”
― Mark Winegardner, The Godfather's Revenge

“My only point is that it’s also possible once in a while to do everything right and still have things go wrong.”
― Mark Winegardner, The Godfather's Revenge

“The cruel things a mother tells a daughter live until the daughter’s dying breath. They often are a daughter’s dying breath.”
― Mark Winegardner, The Godfather's Revenge

“many, looking trapped—became an especially popular choice.”
― Mark Winegardner, The Godfather's Revenge

“Early one seasonably cold morning, the first day of November, in the year of our lord 1952...the Cuyahoga River caught fire.

The river burned.

It wasn't so much the river, but a huge oil slick *on* the river, though distinguishing one from the other was more a job for a chemist than a lay observer.”
― Mark Winegardner, Crooked River Burning: An Epic Literary Romance – Star-Crossed Love Story in Mid-Century Cleveland

“gear”
― Mark Winegardner, The Godfather's Revenge