Lou Berney > Quotes

“That’s the problem with the world,” he said. “You save it today, and tomorrow it’s gone and gotten itself into trouble all over again. It’s like a Kardashian.”
― Lou Berney, The Long and Faraway Gone

“The past had power. The past was a riptide. That's why, if you had a brain in your head, you didn't go in the water.”
― Lou Berney, The Long and Faraway Gone

“The sun dropped beneath the horizon and then detonated, torching the racks of clouds stacked up above the downtown skyline. Wyatt had forgotten how quickly, in the vast empty sky of the southern plains, the ordinary could turn so flamboyant.”
― Lou Berney, The Long and Faraway Gone

“Sometimes the best lie was just the truth left to ripen on the branch too long.”
― Lou Berney, The Long and Faraway Gone

“Was memory like a river that slowed over time to a trickle? Or was it like a house with many rooms that became a house with fewer rooms and then finally just a single room you could never leave? Was that the worst fate in the world? It depended, Wyatt supposed, on what room you ended up in.”
― Lou Berney, The Long and Faraway Gone

“Sometimes the near seemed far, far away and the faraway was right beneath your feet.”
― Lou Berney, The Long and Faraway Gone

“With every decision we create a new future. We destroy all other futures.”
― Lou Berney, November Road

“My philosophy is that guilt is an unhealthy habit,” he said. “It’s what other people try to make you feel so you’ll do what they want. But one life is all we ever get, as far as I know. Why give it away?”
― Lou Berney, November Road

“Two dudes in line behind me argue loudly and irately first about some quarterback, then about some politician, then about Sonic hamburgers vs. Whataburger hamburgers. It must be exhausting to have so many strong opinions. I only have mild preferences, and usually not even that.”
― Lou Berney, Dark Ride

“...girl reached across her desk and pulled the computer keyboard over. “What’s his name?” she said. “Crowley,” Julianna said, surprised. “Christopher Wayne Crowley.” “I shouldn’t do this.” The girl looked back up at Genevieve and laughed. “But fuck it, right?” Genevieve's disappearance from the state fair had been news for about a day. Okay, maybe for a couple of weeks. She was beautiful—the Daily Oklahoman ran her picture with every story, a photo of her from the previous year’s U. S. Grant High School yearbook. Genevieve had thought the photo...”
― Lou Berney, The Long and Faraway Gone

“You could do that, she was discovering. Experience an emotion without allowing it to determine your actions. Hear a knock on the door without feeling compelled to open it. The world didn’t end, towers didn’t topple. Life went on.”
― Lou Berney, November Road

“To do a grid search afterward and make sure nothing that could be flipped had not been flipped. Unless there had been more than one somebody. But even then. “Seems like an awful lot of effort,” Wyatt said. “For a bunch of kids. When I was kid, Officer, and maybe your experience was the same, effort was the least of all possible temptations.” “I’ll tell you what I think.” The cop turned back to them. “Get you a security system. Or a big old dog.” “Ms. Kilkenny told you about the other incidents?” Wyatt said. “Yes, of course I told him,” Candace said. “And stop calling me that.” “She did,” the cop said. “About the birds and such.” He kept a straight face, but the way people do when they want to make clear they’re keeping a straight face. Wyatt could feel Candace vibrating next to him at a frequency that was about to blow out the glass in the Art Deco skylight above them. Wyatt didn’t think the cop was dumb. The cop, like everyone, was just keeping a finger on the pulse of his own self-interest.”
― Lou Berney, The Long and Faraway Gone

“The bellhop at the Monteleone scrambled to open the door for him. “How’s tricks, Mr. Guidry?” “Well, Tommy, I’ll tell you,” Guidry said. “I’m too old to learn any new ones, but the old ones still work just fine.”
― Lou Berney, November Road

“You’re going along, everything’s fine,” she says, even more softly, her thumb digging and digging. “You’re worried about all the little things, the usual things. And then you look up and you don’t understand where you are. You don’t understand how you got there.”
― Lou Berney, Dark Ride

“Getting what you need from a conversation,” she says, “it’s tricky.” “Okay.” “Because every conversation, every person you talk to, is different. You don’t go to France and speak Japanese, do you?” “No. But how—” “You have to pay attention. You have to keep paying attention. The most dangerous thing in the world is a first impression.”
― Lou Berney, Dark Ride

“Who needed to tell the future when you could create it yourself?”
― Lou Berney, November Road

“When faced with two evils, choose the more interesting one.”
― Lou Berney, The Long and Faraway Gone

“The Negroes thought that Jack Kennedy loved them. Hate to break the news, Chick, but Jack Kennedy was like every smart cat: He loved himself and himself only.”
― Lou Berney, November Road

“Julianna wondered about that for a moment, how a relationship could be so broken that not even a daughter’s cancer couldn’t mend it.”
― Lou Berney, The Long and Faraway Gone

“You pick out the kind of person you want to be, then you try your best to be that person.”
― Lou Berney, Gutshot Straight

“Do you know what Filipino sailors do for the pleasure of their female sexual partners? They’re called bolitas. They make incisions in their penis and insert tiny metal ball bearings.”
― Lou Berney, The Long and Faraway Gone

“Lo peor de una infancia infeliz: los momentos felices ocasionales, cuando se te permitía ver por un instante la vida que podrías haber tenido.”
― Lou Berney, November Road

“The dumbest thing you can do, if you’re someone like me, is believe you can be more than you are.”
― Lou Berney, Dark Ride

“The weed makes me feel like I'm being gently removed from this moment by a big rubber eraser.”
― Lou Berney, Dark Ride

“the secret to a successful relationship. One of the secrets. In love as in life, you had to be present.”
― Lou Berney, The Long and Faraway Gone

“I told him I’d been there myself and I have. If you’re human, you’ve been there. I’m right, aren’t I? You go there, you come back, you hope the journey makes you a better person.”
― Lou Berney, Whiplash River

“If it’s a fair fight, Barone learned early on, you’ve screwed up somewhere.”
― Lou Berney, November Road

“This is not the plot twist that my life required. I wish I’d never noticed those kids on the bench. I wish I’d never walked over. I wish, most of all, that I existed in a version of the multiverse where hurting kids with the glowing tip of a cigarette falls far beyond the boundaries of the human imagination. But I don’t and it’s not.”
― Lou Berney, Dark Ride

“10:00 P.M.”
― Lou Berney, Gunshot Straight

“The only poor decision was a decision you allowed someone else to make for you.”
― Lou Berney, November Road