Dale Peck > Quotes

“Sometimes when we think we’re protecting ourselves, we’re really hurting ourselves. And sometimes the people around us too.”
― Dale Peck, Sprout

“People who shop at Barnes and Noble voted Ulysses the best novel of the last century, and who's to tell them different? There was a point when I would have liked to, but apparently that's just because I'm a bitch.”
― Dale Peck

“I have a secret. And everyone knows it but me.”
― Dale Peck, Sprout

“Your past comes with you no matter where you go.”
― Dale Peck, Sprout

“I'm sorry, I don't understand. Could you tell me more about this 'profanity'?"
Mrs. Miller nodded at my dictionary. "I'll assume you don't need a definition. Perhaps you'd prefer an example?"
"That would be so helpful, thank you very much."
Without missing a beat, Mrs. Miller rattled off a stream of obscenities so fully and completely unexpected that I fell off my chair. Mothers were defiled, their male and female children, as well as any and all offspring who just happened to be born out of wedlock. AS for the sacred union that produced these innocent babes, the pertinent bodily appendages were catalogued by a list of names so profoundly scurrilous that a grizzled marine, conceived in a brothel and dying of a disease he contracted in one, would've wished he'd been born as smooth as a Ken doll. The act itself was invoked with such a verity of incestuous, scatological, bestial, and just plain bizarre variations that that same marine would've given up on the Ken doll fantasy, and wished instead that all life had been confined to a single-cell stage, forever free of taint of mitosis, let alone procreation.
Somewhere during the course of all this I noticed I'd snapped my pencil in half, and now I used the two ends to gouge out my brain.
"Guhhhhhh guhhhhh guhhhhhh guhhhhh guhhhhh," I said, by which I meant: "You have shattered whatever tattered remnants of pedagogical propriety I still possessed, and my tender young mind has broken beneath the strain." Nervously, I climbed back into my chair, the two halves of my pencil sticking out of ears like an arrow that had shot clean through my head.
Mrs. Miller allowed herself a small self-congratulatory smile.”
― Dale Peck, Sprout

“There's an alchemy that happens during sex that causes 1 + 1 to add up to much more than 2, even as those halves meld in an almost magical way to form a single unit that's more complete than either of them alone.”
― Dale Peck, Sprout

“You are -" she stopped fanning long enough to push the glasses up her nose - "Sprout Bradford?"

I thought it was a little pretentious to say "You are Sprout Bradford?" instead of "Are you Sprout Bradford?" so I said, "I are Sprout Bradford!" in my best half-hick, half-retard voice.”
― Dale Peck, Sprout

“I hate it when people repeat the last thing that’s been said to them because they’re too afraid to ask what the other person meant by it. “You want to remember this moment,” I said finally, because when it comes right down to it, I’m a coward.”
― Dale Peck, Sprout

“Drift House: Susan's response to Queen Octavia's sarcasm in regards to fading memories..."But we pass our memories on," she insisted. "I mean, from one generation to the next. Parents teach their children. They write things down, tell them stories--”
― Dale Peck

“You show me a teenager who doesn’t like to be flattered and I’ll show you a teenager who’s got a steady source of sex.”
― Dale Peck

“Children," Mrs. Oakenfeld sighed.
"I do not want you to be good to avoid being punished. I do not want you to be good so that you can receive rewards. I want you to be good," she stressed, "because it is the right thing to do.
You are very formidable adversaries, but don’t you see that when you work against eachother, you just cancel eachother out?”
― Dale Peck, The Lost Cities

“Life's cheap out here, Daniel. With a little budgeting I can get by till you go off to college."

"And then?"

My dad reached for whatever he was drinking that day.

"There don't always have to be a then." He poured, drank, swallowed, grimaced. Left his hand on the bottleneck. "Hell, there ain't really a now, so why should there be a then?”
― Dale Peck, Sprout

“she thought that sometimes you walk right into language as though it’s a chair out of place in a dark room: a word, an expression you live with all your life can become suddenly, completely unfamiliar. That night Beatrice stumbled over death, but it was dark, and she was tired, and she believed that she had stumbled across love.”
― Dale Peck, The Law of Enclosures

“Because freedom, it turned out, wasn't like a new shoe: you didn't need to break it in. It felt comfortable the first time you tried it on. It wasn't the present that pinched, it was the past.”
― Dale Peck, Visions and Revisions: Coming of Age in the Age of AIDS

“A physicist once told me that one view of our universe is that its stability is an accident, that thousands upon thousands of relationships are unstable and that chance alone holds ours together.”
― Dale Peck, The Soho Press Book of '80s Short Fiction