Poe Ballantine > Quotes

“I read to him from his mother's Bible the first line of Genesis: 'In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth.' It says nothing about hell, Tom. That came later with the membership drive.”
― Poe Ballantine, Love and Terror on the Howling Plains of Nowhere: A Memoir

“Most people would live in an outhouse in Bangladesh before they would voluntarily move to Nebraska.”
― Poe Ballantine, Love and Terror on the Howling Plains of Nowhere: A Memoir

“The errors of the policeman were no greater or careless or more egregious than mine. It’s just that my mistakes had comparatively little consequence.”
― Poe Ballantine, Love and Terror on the Howling Plains of Nowhere: A Memoir

“Do you remember where the glory in Beowulf is?" I asked him. "It is out amid peril in strange lands pitted against monsters and the mothers of monsters. It isn't in the warm mead hall with roasted meats and the comfort of jesters and wenches.”
― Poe Ballantine, Love and Terror on the Howling Plains of Nowhere: A Memoir

“Why not relent, marry a reformed hooker, buy some old furniture and a ping-pong table, become a Cornhusker fan, open a dusty bottle of Kentucky straight, turn on the Rockies game, and enjoy the brief time you have left on this weird planet of sorrow?”
― Poe Ballantine, Love and Terror on the Howling Plains of Nowhere: A Memoir

“One of my many weaknesses as a journalist is that I can't ask perfect strangers about the masturbation habits of their ex-spouses, just me being a stuffed shirt again.”
― Poe Ballantine, Love and Terror on the Howling Plains of Nowhere: A Memoir

“A good American goes for it, just does it, slakes it, eats it, kills it, the more the better, damn the torpedoes!”
― Poe Ballantine, Love and Terror on the Howling Plains of Nowhere: A Memoir

“Indeed factual stories are so cumbersome, ambiguous, unexciting, and difficult to understand most of the time that they are almost always instantly reconstructed and condensed for better emotional digestion into folktales with foreign villains and blue-eyed saviors.”
― Poe Ballantine, Love and Terror on the Howling Plains of Nowhere: A Memoir

“Psychics are like porno stars," I said. "Anybody can be one.”
― Poe Ballantine, Love and Terror on the Howling Plains of Nowhere: A Memoir

“We'd rather have satisfaction and the maximum titillation than real information, and so history, I insist to my good friend Steve Welch, isn't a cold sequential list of facts, it's a prize anthology of the best fiction.”
― Poe Ballantine, Love and Terror on the Howling Plains of Nowhere: A Memoir

“but happiness is like this, not handed out by the bucket from your television set but measured from a thimble by a stingy but wise old God and so we savored it”
― Poe Ballantine, Love and Terror on the Howling Plains of Nowhere: A Memoir

“Zimmerman had seen so much blood, mayhem, and wretched sorrow in his day, and had liberated so many Hispanic ladies from their underwear, that it was clear to many that he was the only man for the job.”
― Poe Ballantine, Love and Terror on the Howling Plains of Nowhere: A Memoir

“Fate is often like a canoe after you've lost your paddles.”
― Poe Ballantine, Love and Terror on the Howling Plains of Nowhere: A Memoir