Gary Inbinder > Quotes

“To say "He was a young fool, and now he's an old fool" is to make a distinction without a difference.”
― Gary Inbinder

“Thank heaven for people who are satisfied with facts that conform to the reality they wish to believe.”
― Gary Inbinder, Confessions of the Creature

“The great city seemed to weigh upon me, as though it were crushing me under its heap of brick and stone. Gray, drizzly skies, congested streets, the soot-belching boats and barges chugging up and down the Thames, the teeming mass of four millions hastening about the countless activities of daily life in a metropolis, things adventurous, meaningful, spiritual, quotidian, futile, criminal, meaningless and absurd. Amidst this seething stew of humanity, I painted.”
― Gary Inbinder, The Flower to the Painter

“Venice appeared to me as in a recurring dream, a place once visited and now fixed in memory like images on a photographer’s plates so that my return was akin to turning the leaves of a portfolio: a scene of the gondolas moored by the railway station; the Grand Canal in twilight; the Rialto bridge; the Piazza San Marco; the shimmering, rippling wonderland; the bustling water traffic; the fish market; the Lido beach and boardwalk; Teeny in the launch; the singing, gesturing gondoliers; the bourgeois tourists drinking coffee at Florian’s; the importunate beggars; the drowned girl’s ghost haunting the Bridge of Sighs; the pigeons, mosquitoes and fetor of decay.”
― Gary Inbinder, The Flower to the Painter

“She wore a loose-fitting purple velvet Pre-Raphaelite gown, and her abundant dark-brown hair flowed down her back and shoulders to her waist. As she drew near, I noticed her warm brown eyes peeping at me beneath lush, un-plucked brows, her smiling red lips and smooth, un-powdered cheeks almost begging for kisses. She possessed a beauty much different from Daisy, more like a wildflower in the unspoiled earth than a prize-winning rose in a formal garden. However, her Pre-Raphaelite fashion might have been an affectation of a different kind, a bit closer to nature but a stylish imitation just the same.”
― Gary Inbinder, The Flower to the Painter

“Life's a jumble of farce and melodrama, the chaotic scribbling of a third-rate penny-a-liner. We mock it to keep from going mad--or at least to display our good taste.”
― Gary Inbinder, The Hanged Man: A Mystery in Fin de Siecle Paris

“The philosophers write about things as they are and as they appear to be, but as an artist I find that appearance is everything.”
― Gary Inbinder, The Flower to the Painter

“I suppose longevity requires giving up life's pleasures, one by one, until there's nothing left.”
― Gary Inbinder, The Devil in Montmartre: A Mystery in Fin de Siècle Paris

“Does technology illuminate reason, or is it the other way around?”
― Gary Inbinder, The Hanged Man: A Mystery in Fin de Siecle Paris

“You're ambitious, Achille. You've become the chief of detectives in record time, and there's talk you'll be the prefect someday, or even a cabinet minister. You'll have all the temptations of high office--honors, titles, bribes. As for your 'improvements,' see what people think of them when you try to change the world at their expense. You can make your own cross and climb your Calvary; in the end you'll die and the world will go on as messed up as it was before.”
― Gary Inbinder, The Man Upon the Stair: A Mystery in Fin de Siecle Paris

“At the Uffizi, I experienced a moment that was touching, painful, and almost embarrassing. We stopped in front of the famous Botticelli painting, The Birth of Venus. I gazed wistfully at her incomparably lovely, yet, as Vasari described, oddly distorted form emerging from the waves in a seashell, her long red-golden tresses blown by Zephyrs. No woman ever had so elongated a neck or such sinuous limbs. Botticelli contorted, and some might say deformed, the human shape to give us a glimpse of the sublime.”
― Gary Inbinder, Confessions of the Creature

“A place without secrets hardly seems the proper venue for a spymaster... Orlovsky chose to hold court in the demimonde, a milieu in which he seemed to proclaim his presence with characteristic audacity. However, M. Orlovsky was one of those camouflaged insects that blends into its surroundings and thus remains hidden in plain sight.”
― Gary Inbinder, The Man Upon the Stair: A Mystery in Fin de Siecle Paris

“Tears streamed down her wrinkled face. This world that she had longed to change for the better was as bad as the one into which she had been born. "An exercise in futility," she murmured.”
― Gary Inbinder, The Hanged Man: A Mystery in Fin de Siecle Paris

“Even though we know it won't come in our lifetime, or the next generation, or the one after that, we should hope for an era of love and peace, we should strive for it.

Of course, Adele, but until that time I'll settle for just laws and honest, capable, and compassionate people to enforce them.”
― Gary Inbinder, The Devil in Montmartre: A Mystery in Fin de Siècle Paris