Kem Nunn > Quotes

“If someone doesn’t care about himself, you begin to lose interest after a while.”
― Kem Nunn, Tapping the Source

“Every man is on earth to symbolize something he is ignorant of.”
― Kem Nunn, Pomona Queen

“People want miracles. Sometimes the only miracle is, I take your hand. That’s the miracle.” A”
― Kem Nunn, Chance: A Novel

“But then her stubbornness was connected to her strength, he supposed, and her strength was one of the things about her that he most admired.”
― Kem Nunn, Tapping the Source

“It was how it had been with the madman among the tombs, that their number was legion, far in excess at any rate if the number listed on the back of the door as the room's maximum occupancy.”
― Kem Nunn, Chance

“You might get Yahweh and burning bushes.”
― Kem Nunn, The Dogs of Winter

“Chance imagined himself no stranger to the machinations by which people went about establishing the architecture of their own imprisonment, the citadels from whose basement windows one might on occasion hear their cries. Like Houdini, we construct the machinery of our entrapment from which we must finally escape or die.”
― Kem Nunn, Chance: A Novel

“The steps a man takes from the day of his birth until that of his death trace in time an inconceivable figure.”
― Kem Nunn, Pomona Queen

“We are dreamers, shouting out in our sleep, pilgrims lost in a forest of symbols where no man can say with certainty who he is.”
― Kem Nunn, Pomona Queen

“History is coming for the empire.”
― Kem Nunn, Chance

“As far as he knew, no one in his family had turned out normal yet and he didn’t see why he should be the first.”
― Kem Nunn, Tapping the Source

“It was a little like having religion. The world was a more interesting place if there was more to it than met the eye.”
― Kem Nunn, Unassigned Territory

“We get the place on the right swell, surfing it is one thing, getting good shots is something else. You get fog up there. You get rain. You get clouds. The light is shit. Harmon knows that too. That’s why he asked for you. Radical conditions, a narrow window. You better have somebody who can get the shot. His problem is, he thinks you’re still the one.”
― Kem Nunn, The Dogs of Winter

“Guilt was for lesser men. A sign of weakness.”
― Kem Nunn, The Dogs of Winter

“Words are what I have and it's the words as words that interest me.”
― Kem Nunn, Chance

“He had come to a place of great beauty but it had taken the waves and the act of riding them to grant him communion.”
― Kem Nunn, The Dogs of Winter

“She was staring out a window and he was taken, as he had been in the bookstore, by her length and line.”
― Kem Nunn, Chance: A Novel

“It all took longer than expected and the truck a piece of shit with blown shocks and springs poking through vinyl seat covers and the late light drawing out the shadows in Chance’s neighborhood by the time he and D came finally bouncing up from the Great Highway in the ancient rig, one of many as the afternoon rush hour he’d been hoping to beat lurched into full swing with lines of cars at each and every intersection and jaywalking children with backpacks and cell phones and Chinese workmen unloading fish trucks at competing corner groceries and tattooed teenagers with funny hats on clattering skateboards.”
― Kem Nunn, Chance: A Novel

“A willingness to go against the conventional wisdom was one of the side effects of looking at the world in a particular light.”
― Kem Nunn, Unassigned Territory

“He guessed he could see now, in the darkness of this room, with this new place throbbing around him, how going back could be like dying. It was the first time he had seen it that way; and from that angle, the betrayal was somehow not so huge.”
― Kem Nunn, Tapping the Source

“He was aware of the pulse in her wrist, warm against the heel of his palm. He was aware of his desire, taking him by the throat.”
― Kem Nunn, Chance: A Novel

“No one gets out of here alive.”
― Kem Nunn, The Dogs of Winter

“A lifetime of yearning unwound before him like some lost and endless highway.”
― Kem Nunn, Unassigned Territory

“The morning, the surf, could not have been more perfect. A clean swell, three to five feet out of the southwest. Paper-thin walls with long workable faces turned toward the sun. While he surfed, a school of porpoise arrived to join him for a time in the waves, passing in a leisurely fashion, slapping at the water with their bodies, calling to one another with strange sounds. They passed so close he could have reached them in a single stroke. A group of pelicans cruised by in formation, their bodies within inches of the sea. They circled the point and passed him once more, this time just inside the lineup, actually skimming along the faces of the waves, the last bird just ahead of the falling crest so it was like they were surfing, at play on the empty point, and he joined them in the waves, letting jewel-strung faces slip beneath his board, carving lines out of crisp morning glass. He”
― Kem Nunn, Tapping the Source

“This is the new frontier up here. You know that, don't you. Undiscovered country.”
― Kem Nunn, The Dogs of Winter

“He found the big man outside in the alley, seated on an overturned crate, a bag from some local fast food joint at his side, a large Diet Coke in one hand and a copy of The Grapes of Wrath in the other. He looked up as Chance moved to join him. “I’ll be all around in the dark,” D said by way of greeting. He did not consult the book. “Wherever there’s a cop beatin’ up a guy, I’ll be there. I’ll be in the way guys yell when they’re mad. I’ll be in the way kids laugh when they’re hungry an’ they know supper’s ready. An’ when the people are eatin’ the stuff they raise, and livin’ in the houses they built . . . I’ll be there too.” He paused. “I may have left out a couple,” he said. He looked at the book.”
― Kem Nunn, Chance: A Novel

“And he had wondered if it would end that way for him too - one more ragged pilgrim on the road toward some bankrupt enlightenment, endlessly sorting information while the truth rolled on, untouched, beneath his very nose.”
― Kem Nunn, Unassigned Territory

“That West was long gone, the West of the imagination.”
― Kem Nunn, Pomona Queen