John O'Hara > Quotes

“I have work to do, and I am afraid not to do it.”
― John O'hara

“They say great themes make great novels.. but what these young writers don't understand is that there is no greater theme than men and women.”
― John O'Hara

“The trouble is people leave too much to luck. They get married and then trust to luck. They should be sure in the first place.”
― John O'Hara

“America may be unique in being a country which has leapt from barbarism to decadence without touching civilization.”
― John O'Hara

“George Gershwin died on July 11, 1937, but I don’t have to believe it if I don’t want to.”
― John O'Hara

“When Caroline Walker fell in love with Julian English she was a little tired of him. That was in the summer of 1926, one of the most unimportant years in the history of the United States, and the year in which Caroline Walker was sure her life had reached a pinnacle of uselessness.”
― John O'Hara, Appointment in Samarra

“There comes a time in a man's life, if he is unlucky and leads a full life, when he has a secret so dirty that he knows he never will get rid of it. (Shakespeare knew this and tried to say it, but he said it just as badly as anyone ever said it. 'All the perfumes of Arabia' makes you think of all the perfumes of Arabia and nothing more. It is the trouble with all metaphors where human behavior is concerned. People are not ships, chess men, flowers, race horses, oil paintings, bottles of champagne, excrement, musical instruments or anything else but people. Metaphors are all right to give you an idea.)”
― John O'Hara, BUtterfield 8

“A merchant in Baghdad sends his servant to the marketplace for provisions. Shortly, the servant comes home white and trembling and tells him that in the marketplace he was jostled by a woman, whom he recognized as Death, and she made a threatening gesture. Borrowing the merchant's horse, he flees at top speed to Samarra, a distance of about 75 miles (125 km), where he believes Death will not find him. The merchant then goes to the marketplace and finds Death, and asks why she made the threatening gesture. She replies, "That was not a threatening gesture, it was only a start of surprise. I was astonished to see him in Baghdad, for I had an appointment with him tonight in Samarra.”
― John O'Hara

“The people who want regeneration to be permanent are fanatics for the happy ending, dissatisfied with themselves and with anyone else, unrealistic men and women, anti-Christs, who were entertained by the miracles but learned nothing from Calvary.”
― John O'Hara

“Out story never ends.
You pull the pin out of a hand grenade, and in a few seconds it explodes and men in a small area get killed and wounded. That makes bodies to be buried, hurt men to be treated. It makes widows and fatherless children and bereaved parents. It means pension machinery, and it makes for pacifism in some and for lasting hatred in others. Again, a man out of the danger area sees the carnage the grenade creates, and he shoots himself in the foot. Another man had been standing there just two minutes before the thing went off, and thereafter he believes in God or in a rabbit’s foot. Another man sees human brains for the first time and locks up the picture until one night years later, when he finally comes out with a description of what he saw, and the horror of his description turns his wife away from him....”
― John O'Hara, Appointment in Samarra

“He stood at the table, looking down at the handkerchief case and stud box, and was afraid. Upstairs was a girl who was a person. That he loved her seemed unimportant compared to what she was. He only loved her, which really made him a lot less than a friend or an acquaintance. Other people saw her and talked to her when she was herself, her great, important self. It was wrong, this idea that you know someone better because you have shared a bed and a bathroom with her. He knew, and not another human being knew, that she cried “I” or “high” in moments of great ecstasy. He knew, he alone knew her when she let herself go, when she herself was not sure whether she was wildly gay or wildly sad, but one and the other. But that did not mean that he knew her. Far from it. It only meant that he was closer to her when he was close, but (and this was the first time the thought had come to him) maybe farther away than anyone else when he was not close. It certainly looked that way now.”
― John O'Hara, Appointment in Samarra

“Bing: You’re a heel…a low down rotten heel…anything that doesn’t go your way, anything that you can’t have you destroy.”
― John O'Hara, BUtterfield 8

“But William Dilworth English, M.D., was not thinking of the immediate punishment of his son; that was something which could be decided upon. He was not thinking of the glory of having a son who hopped freight trains. The thing that put him in the deep mood and gave him the heavy look that Julian saw on his face was that 'chip off the old block' refrain of Butch Doerflinger’s. William Dilworth English was thinking of his own life, the scrupulous, notebook honesty; the penny-watching, bill-paying, self-sacrificing honesty that had been his religion after his own father’s suicide. And that was his reward: a son who turned out to be like his grandfather, a thief.”
― John O'Hara, Appointment in Samarra

“The liquor, that is, the rye, was all about the same: most people bought drug store rye on prescriptions (the physicians who were club members saved 'scrips' for their patients), and cut it with alcohol and colored water. It was not poisonous, and it got you tight, which was all that was required of it and all that could be said for it.”
― John O'Hara, Appointment in Samarra

“and nominally a cigar manufacturer. He never came to the club except on nights like this, when Mr. and Mrs. Ammermann would entertain a few of their—her—friends at a smaller table. Mildred, towering above Losch, the club steward, and pointing, daintily for her, with one finger as she held a small stack of place-cards in her left hand, apparently was one woman who had not heard about the business of the night before. It was axiomatic in Gibbsville that you could tell Mill Ammermann anything and be sure it wouldn’t be repeated; because Mill probably was thinking of the mashie-niblick approach over the trees to the second green. Julian derived some courage from her smile. He always had liked Mill anyway. He was fragmentarily glad over again that Mill did not live in New York, for in New York she would have been marked Lesbian on sight.”
― John O'Hara, Appointment in Samarra

“He thought of these things. Harry must have changed since then, become obnoxious or something. Julian reasoned that he could not have asked the Harry he now knew to invest so much money in the business. Well, maybe the winter had something to do with it. You went to the Gibbsville Club for lunch; Harry was there. You went to the country club to play squash on Whit Hofman's private court, and Harry was around. You went to the Saturday night drinking parties, and there was Harry; inescapable, everywhere. Carter Davis was there, too, and so was Whit; so was Froggy Ogden. But they were different. The bad new never had worn off Harry Reilly. And the late fall and winter seemed now to have been spoiled by room after room with Harry Reilly. You could walk outside in the summer, but even though you can walk outside in winter, winter isn't that way. You have to go back to the room soon, and there is no life in the winter outside of rooms. Not in Gibbsville, which was a pretty small room itself.”
― John O'Hara, Appointment in Samarra

“God help us all but he was right. It was time for him to die. There was nothing for him to do today, there was nothing for him to do today.… There, that was settled. Now let the whole thing begin again.”
― John O'Hara, Appointment in Samarra

“I told you when you were married, I told you to take a firm stand on certain things.”
“You never told me what things, though.”
“Well, dear, a nice girl. I couldn’t very well tell you some things till the matter came up.”
― John O'Hara, Appointment in Samarra

“On this Sunday morning in May, this girl who later was to be the cause of a sensation in New York, awoke much too early for her night before. One minute she was asleep, the next she was completely awake and dumped into despair. It was the kind of despair that she had known perhaps two thousand times before, there being 365 mornings in a calendar year.”
― John O'Hara, BUtterfield 8

“I love you? Yes, I love you. Like saying I have cancer.”
― John O'Hara, Appointment in Samarra

“There were numerous physical combats between husbands and wives, and not always the husbands that matched the wives. Kitty Hofman, for instance, had been given a black eye by Carter Davis when she kicked him in the groin for dunking her head in a punch bowl for calling him a son of a bitch for telling her she looked like something the cat dragged in. And so on.”
― John O'Hara, Appointment in Samarra

“...Julian believed in a thought process that if you think against a thing in advance, if you anticipate it—whether it's the fear that you're going to cut yourself when you shave, or lose your wife to another man—you've licked it. It can't happen, because things like that are known only by God. Any future thing is known only to God; and if you have a super-premonition about a thing, it'll be wrong because God is God, and is not giving away one of His major powers to Julian McHenry English.”
― John O'Hara

“It made a change in himself, and we must not change ourselves much. We can stand only so many—so few—changes. To know that there were people who he thought were his friends, his good friends, but who were his enemies—that was going to make a change, he knew. When was the last time there had been a change in himself? He thought and thought, rejecting items that were not change but only removal or adornment.”
― John O'Hara, Appointment in Samarra

“When composing a story, withhold the essential information—do not mention whatever it is that causes the characters to act as they do.”
― John O'Hara, The New York Stories

“Did you ever read The Cat's Revenge, by Claude Balls? Did you ever read The Passionate Russian, by E. Nawdor Titzoff? Or The Passionate Lover, by E. Roder Haggard?”
― John O'Hara, From the Terrace

“There were numerous physical combats between husbands and wives, and not always the husbands that matched the wives. Kitty Hofman, for instance, had been given a black eye by Carter Davis when she kicked him in the groin for dunking her head in a punch bowl for calling him a son of a bitch for telling her she looked like something the cat dragged in.”
― John O'Hara, Appointment in Samarra

“From conversations with her friends, and from her own observations, Nancy knew that in every marriage (which after all boils down to two human beings living together) the wife has to keep her mouth shut about at least one small thing her husband does that disgusts her.”
― John O'Hara, BUtterfield 8

“Girls fitted easily into their own and your own picture of someone dying of unrequited love. If they slipped out of it before you were ready, that was all right too; their slipping out frequently was the necessary reminder that an affair had run its course. It also was the necessary reminder that the realist in a woman, the good appraiser, makes her want to take a loss and get out before she is—for the purposes of the analogy—ruined.”
― John O'Hara, Appointment in Samarra

“Animals"

Have you forgotten what we were like then
when we were still first rate
when the day came fat with an apple in its mouth

it's no use worrying about Time
but we did have a few tricks up our sleeves
and turned a few sharp corners

the whole pasture looked like our meal
we didn't need speedometers
we could manage cocktails out of ice and water

I wouldn't want to be faster
or greener than now if you were with me O you
were the best of my days.”
― John O'Hara

“I’m so afraid, but it’s just as wrong to stop, isn’t it? Isn’t it just as wrong to stop?”
― John O'Hara, Appointment in Samarra