Thomas Mallon > Quotes

“...causing him to consider the possibility that there really was no such thing as happiness or unhappiness. Maybe there was only intensity-and then everything else.”
― Thomas Mallon, Fellow Travelers

“I always fall for the truly cold, cold people, cold men because I decide their reserve and awkwardness is really bottled-up warmth that they're waiting for me to release, an act for which they'll repay me with extravagant love.”
― Thomas Mallon, Fellow Travelers

“he’d spent his whole life trying to make God love him—and that this didn’t matter in the slightest. All that mattered was that he loved God. He told me that once he knew this he was home free.”
― Thomas Mallon, Fellow Travelers

“I seem to be always searching for something to lose myself in completely... It’s like we say in seminary — ‘beyond measure.”
― Thomas Mallon, Fellow Travelers

“Daisy loved all parades, especially this one, whose crush of observers, prone to impulsive kisses, made it one more piece of the mistletoe under which she lived her life”
― Thomas Mallon

“With thanks to Hawkins Fuller (I got the job. You’re wonderful.) Timothy Laughlin”
― Thomas Mallon, Fellow Travelers

“To some extent the history of plagiarism is a history of notebooks.”
― Thomas Mallon, Stolen Words - The Classic Book on Plagiarism

“He wasn’t angry because she knew his secrets; he was angry because she couldn’t be the way out of them.”
― Thomas Mallon, Fellow Travelers

“[Voltaire] was generally unbedeviled by any foolish consistency.”
― Thomas Mallon, A Book of One's Own: People and Their Diaries

“It sounded like some early piece of the catechism, a cosmically important question-and-answer he had somehow missed, on the order of Who made us? God made us. But Tim’s confusion, and the desire to respond with the right answer, were lost in his own arousal. He whispered, “Hawkins Fuller,” not as an answer to the question, but simply an amazed statement of the other man’s actuality. “Hawkins Fuller,” he said, repeating this name for a discovery he felt the need to radio from one world to another, this name for a new Eden, whose recently glimpsed existence had now been fully confirmed.”
― Thomas Mallon, Fellow Travelers

“Bless me, Father, for I have been unable to sin; he on´t see me.”
― Thomas Mallon, Fellow Travelers

“Nazism and communism were the same thing; every man on the street knew it. The difference between them was a semantical matter for the fancier poli-sci professors at Fordham.”
― Thomas Mallon, Fellow Travelers

“this name for a new Eden, whose recently glimpsed existence had now been fully confirmed.”
― Thomas Mallon, Fellow Travelers

“Nixon watched it, the usual mixture of feelings stirred in him. He could never quite make up his mind about the man. Reagan had been too smart to let Ford lure him into the cabinet; you had to give him that. But he’d always had it too easy, especially with the goddamned Republican Party in California. Usually so lazy, they’d gone all out for him in ’66 and made it possible for him to do what Richard Nixon, an ex–vice president, hadn’t been able to four years earlier: send Pat Brown packing from Sacramento. (Christ, Brown’s kid Jerry had moved awfully fast! Now the governor at thirty-eight.”
― Thomas Mallon, Finale: A Novel of the Reagan Years

“he knew that if he lived to be a hundred, he would never be more in love than he was now.”
― Thomas Mallon, Fellow Travelers

“Her attraction to that solid type depended to some extent on a belief in herself as its opposite-a girl still cut out for unusual adventures and unusual personalities...Yes, it was time to put an end to her girlhood, but she couldn't yet put an end to this sense of herself...”
― Thomas Mallon, Fellow Travelers

“He turned his head far enough to plunge his face into the muscular flesh of Fuller’s chest and shoulder. In response, Fuller tousled and petted his hair, but the next words he said were inflamed, not soothing. “Who owns you?” Fuller whispered, sharply, into his ear.”
― Thomas Mallon, Fellow Travelers

“But there are things I approve of less.” “Of our boy Skippy railing against the reds?” “No. Of your breaking his heart.”
― Thomas Mallon, Fellow Travelers

“I have a picture of the Pont Neuf on a wall in my apartment, but i know that Paris is really on the closet shelf, in the box next to the sleeping bag, with the rest of my diaries.”
― Thomas Mallon

“How could he explain? Without Hawk’s love in return, his own love had become unbearable. He had stopped because what they did together could not be sprung from the world of shame and suppressed terror and blackmail, from Tommy McIntyre’s extortive market of secrets. He’d once believed that he and Hawkins had lifted themselves above the wicked Earth by doing what they did in bed, but that sense had been replaced by a realization that joining their bodies only chained them to the electrified cage of who had what on whom.”
― Thomas Mallon, Fellow Travelers

“as if the saint’s relics would provide an equally keen, but less risky, jolt than the saint.”
― Thomas Mallon, Fellow Travelers

“Nada de aquello le importaba. En ese momento sabía que diría cualquier mentira y negaría hasta tres veces a Cristo por un roce más de la mano de Hawkins.”

Excerpt From
Los lavanda: Fellow travelers”
― Thomas Mallon, Fellow Travelers

“Finland, that country so like himself, for so long half free and quite comfortable, somehow exempt from the fuss of near-apocalypse.”
― Thomas Mallon, Fellow Travelers

“I’m not proceeding entirely by logic. You and your cat’s cradle of knowns and unknowns can work that way. A fine lot of good it’s doing!”
― Thomas Mallon, Landfall: A Novel

“So you’ll never guess who I heard from,” said Kelly. “Who would that be?” “Not ‘whom’?” asked Kelly, her face momentarily clouded by doubt. “No, my dear. It’s a subject, not an object. At least in my question.”
― Thomas Mallon, Finale: A Novel of the Reagan Years

“He could not deny what he still believed in his heart of hearts: that the censure of McCarthy would, despite everything, be a victory for the Communists”
― Thomas Mallon, Fellow Travelers

“America I’m putting my queer shoulder to the wheel. —ALLEN GINSBERG”
― Thomas Mallon, Fellow Travelers

“You may be intellectually ecstatic or aesthetically aggrieved at the idea of a Library of Congress in a cigarette pack, but fear is not really the appropriate reaction to this imminence.”
― Thomas Mallon, A Book of One's Own: People and Their Diaries

“It occurs to me that my generation is desperately trying to pay large sums of money to live in the same apartments their parents fled for the suburbs…”
― Thomas Mallon, The Very Heart of It: New York Diaries, 1983-1994

“[Pepys’] diary gurgles like a full stomach and jingles like a full pocket.”
― Thomas Mallon, A Book of One's Own: People and Their Diaries