Richard Price > Quotes

“You don't write about the horrors of war. No. You write about a kid's burnt socks lying in the road.”
― Richard Price

“But then something happened, Ray, something amazing. Something...

"That white cop sitting next to me? He took a long look at my mother when she came in, just like, absorbed her, and then without even turning to me, he just put his hand on my back, up between my neck and shoulder...

"And all he did was squeeze. Give me a little squeeze of sympathy, then rubbed that same spot with his palm for maybe two, three seconds, and that was it.

"But I swear to you, nobody, in my entire life up to that point had ever touched me with that kind of tenderness. I had never experienced a sympathetic hand like that, and Ray, it felt like lightning.

"I mean, the guy did it without thinking, I'm sure. And when dinnertime rolled around he had probably forgotten all about it. Forgot about me, too, for that matter... But I didn't forget.

"I didn't walk around thinking about it nonstop either, but something like seven years later when I was at community college? The recruiting officer for the PD came on campus for Career Day, and I didn't really like college all that much to begin with, so I took the test for the academy, scored high, quit school and never looked back.

"And usually when I tell people why I became a cop I say because it would keep Butchie and Antoine out of my life, and there's some truth in that.

"But I think the real reason was because that recruiting officer on campus that day reminded me, in some way, you know, conscious or not, of that housing cop who had sat on the bench with me when I was thirteen.

"In fact, I don't think it, I know it. As sure as I'm standing here, I know I became a cop because of him. For him. To be like him. God as my witness, Ray. The man put his hand on my back for three seconds and it rerouted my life for the next twenty-nine years.

"It's the enormity of small things... Adults, grown-ups, us, we have so much power... And sometimes when we find ourselves coming into contact with certain kinds of kids? Needy kids? We have to be ever so careful...”
― Richard Price

“The bigger the issue, the smaller you write. Remember that. You don’t write about the horrors of war. No. You write about a kid’s burnt socks lying on the road. You pick the smallest manageable part of the big thing, and you work off the resonance.”
― Richard Price

“falafel joint, jazz joint, gyro joint, corner. Schoolyard, creperie, realtor, corner. Tenement, tenement, tenement museum, corner. Pink Pony, Blind Tiger, muffin boutique, corner. Sex shop, tea shop, synagogue, corner. Bollywood, Buddha, botanica, corner. Leather outlet, leather outlet, leather outlet, corner. Bar, school, bar, school. People's Park, corner. Tyson mural, Celia Cruz mural, Ladi Di mural, corner. Bling shop, barbershop, car service corner.”
― Richard Price, Lush Life

“Some day, my son, you are going to learn that the two greatest joys of being a man are beating the hell out of someone and getting the hell beaten out of you, good night.”
― Richard Price, I Wanderers

“I love Israel, I go back all the time. I just love New York a little more. My workers are Arabs, my best friend is a black man from Alabama, my girlfriend's a Puerto Rican, and my landlord is a half-Jew bastard. You know what I did this morning? I read in the paper yesterday that the circus is setting up in the Madison Square Garden, they said the elephants would be walking through the Holland Tunnel at dawn. I'm a photographer a little too, you know? So I get up at five o'clock, bike over to the tunnel, and wait. It turns out the paper got it wrong, they came through the Lincoln, but still, you know? This is a hell of a place.”
― Richard Price

“almost nobody made it out of the game in one piece, and almost everybody thought they would be the exception.”
― Richard Price, Clockers

“Strike experienced a moment of pure clarity: he would never make it out of here, would never rise above his current position as Rodney’s lieutenant, because all the intelligence and prudence and vision came to nothing if it wasn’t tempered and supported by a certain blindness, an oblivious animal will that Rodney had, that he, Strike, did not have.
Rodney would survive all this not because of his guts or his brains, but because he understood that there was no real life out here on the street, no real lives other than his own, and that what really mattered was coming first in all things, in all ways and at all costs.”
― Richard Price, Clockers

“the only place a man can be truly handicapped is in his mind, and that a man who can conquer his own mind has got the world at his feet.”
― Richard Price, Clockers

“Strike said "Huh" again, thinking about betrayal, about how everything and everybody were just so much smoke.”
― Richard Price, Clockers

“On the nights they went to bed at the same time, Rocco would lie there and watch her go to the closet, watch her choose either silky slips or mannish shirts, like running up sex flags from across the room.”
― Richard Price, Clockers

“As he reached for his Visa card, the security monitor next to the register caught Billy in all his glory: football burly but slump-shouldered, his pale face with its exhaustion-starred eyes topped with half a pitchfork’s worth of prematurely graying hair. He was only forty-two, but that crushed-cellophane gaze of his combined with a world-class insomniac’s posture had once gotten him into a movie at a senior citizen’s discount.”
― Richard Price, The Whites

“If God hates your guts, he grants you your deepest wish’?”
― Richard Price, Clockers

“Rocco was gripped with the panic he often experienced around her, around himself. He seemed to be both here now and simultaneously five years in the future looking back at this moment, at the loss of this moment. He was always sliding past the nowness of being with her, throwing himself at her like a cranked-up insincere clown for an exhausting fifteen minutes a day or getting cozy with booze in order to achieve the proper mood, and from the time she was born he had felt he was on his deathbed, remembering with regret how skittish and slippery his time with her had been. Had been, as if she were a hard thirty-seven and divorced instead of a two-year old baby, as if he were eighty-six and senile instead of forty-three and slightly overweight.”
― Richard Price, Clockers

“Brenda’s lawyer was Paul Rosenbaum, champion of the poor, the downtrodden, the nonwhite, the addicted, the desperate, the technically guilty, the occasionally framed, the submoronic, the psychopathic, the abused turned abuser, the formerly innocent casualties of a racist free-enterprise system now fully grown to payback size; Rosenbaum, a world-class pain in the ass who turned every case into an indictment of the society into which both victim and victimizer had been involuntarily deposited at birth.”
― Richard Price, Freedomland: A Novel

“Saturday was a sweet and sunny day, the kind that made people think about getting it together once and for all -- health, kids, jobs, personal appearance, doing things right this time.”
― Richard Price, Clockers

“He had the kind of droopy eyes that suggested he had never recovered from the exhausting experience of being born.”
― Richard Price, The Whites

“everybody was full of shit in this game. The cops bullshitted each other, the dealers bullshitted each other, the cops bullshitted the dealers, the dealers bullshitted the cops, the cops took bribes, the dealers ratted each other out. Nobody knew for sure which side anybody was on; no one really knew how much or how little money anybody else was making. Everything was smoke.”
― Richard Price, Clockers

“The County Jail looked like a tall, forbidding elementary school. Seven stories of dirty brown brick, one hundred years old and now operating at 330 percent of capacity.”
― Richard Price, Clockers

“Although the clientele were primarily the Eloi of the Lower East Side and Williamsburg, an incident a month earlier had involved a platinumed-out crew of Bronx Morlocks:”
― Richard Price, Lush Life

“The snacks, the school chairs and the glazed tile walls made the room seem to Rocco like recess time in hell.”
― Richard Price, Clockers

“There’s some people in this room right now,” Pavlicek said, “who gave twenty years or more to the Job, myself included. We’ve seen it all, handled it all, and when a young person dies we’ve all walked up the stairs, knocked on the doors, and delivered the news, between us, to an army of parents. We’ve caught them on their way to the floor, carried them into the bedroom or living room, then gone into their kitchens and brought them water—over the years, an ocean of water, glass by glass by glass. And so, after all that, we think we understand what it must feel like to be one of those parents, but we don’t. We can’t. I still can’t. But I’m getting there.”
― Richard Price, The Whites

“Shaking it off as best he could, he applied himself to the stuffing of envelopes, today’s skim surpassing for the first time $3 a point; suicidal most likely, but he just needed to leave; this city, this life, and he would do what he had to do to make it happen.”
― Richard Price, Lush Life

“Yeah, but I ain’t worried about it,” Rodney said,”
― Richard Price, Clockers

“cause you knew too much and you was too scared to be trusted.”
― Richard Price, Clockers

“Indians, man, they were so tough they useta eat steak with a spoon." "I hate steak," said Tyrone.”
― Richard Price, Bloodbrothers: A Novel

“Later that night it took him most of a bottle of Chartreuse to work up the resolve to quit drinking.”
― Richard Price, The Whites

“Joey Capra was a zip. Short, wiry, always moving, blinking, smoking, chewing. A hook nose and bad posture made him look like a comma.”
― Richard Price

“He restrained himself from another wisecrack, infinitesimally but with great effort attempting to close down his nightclub approach to education; every positive change in his life, every minute increment in character, acquired more or less through shame.”
― Richard Price, Samaritan

“Don't they watch the news? Uranus isn't even a planet anymore.”
― Richard Price, The Whites