Robert Stone > Quotes

“I’ve been waiting my whole life to fuck up like this.”
― Robert Stone, Dog Soldiers

“I've always remembered. This fellow said to me - if you think someones'doing you wrong, it's not for you to judge. Kill them first and then God can do the judging.”
― Robert Stone, Dog Soldiers

“What you're trying to do when you write is to crowd the reader out of his own space and occupy it with yours, in a good cause. You're trying to take over his sensibility and deliver an experience that moves from mere information.”
― Robert Stone

“That's the great thing about literature -- it makes the world less lonely.”
― Robert Stone

“It’s hard to stay away from religion when you mess with acid.”
― Robert Stone

“If you haven't fought for your life for something you want, you don't know what's life all about.”
― Robert Stone, Dog Soldiers

“The desires of the heart...are as crooked as a corkscrew.”
― Robert Stone, Dog Soldiers

“We tell ourselves our own stories, selectively, in order to keep our sense of self intact.”
― Robert Stone, Journalism: The Democratic Craft

“If you couldn't tell the difference between what hurt and what didn't, you had no business being alive. You can't have any good times if you can't tell.”
― Robert Stone, Dog Soldiers

“The term [Americanization] invokes the transformation of the landscape into unnatural mechanical shapes, of night into day, of speed for its own sake, an irrational passion for novelty at the expense of quality, a worship of gimmickry.”
― Robert Stone

“We carry nemesis inside us.”
― Robert Stone

“He sat desiring the girl - a speed-hardened straw-colored junkie stewardess, a spoiled Augustana Lutheran, compounded of airport Muzak and beauty parlor school. Her eyes were fouled with smog and propane spray.”
― Robert Stone, Dog Soldiers

“The richest fuckin' people in the richest country in the world - you gonna tell them some little guy in a hole in South America can have something they can't? Like shit, man. If the little guy in the hole can be a revolutionary, they can be revolutionaries too.”
― Robert Stone, Dog Soldiers

“How learned and fine we believed ourselves to be! How shitty of the world to deal with us this way.”
― Robert Stone, Death of the Black-Haired Girl

“But Moby-Dick is the explanation of America. It’s not just a novel. It is a book of prophecy. It is the book. It is the book of America.”
― Robert Stone

“The scene is a writer's study, shabby, drafty but tax-deductible. The writer is reading the last hundred pages of his work in progress. For the past fifty or so, a kind of slow terror has been rising in his breast. All these pages had seemed necessary. They contain many good things. Ironies. Insights. And yet they seem to have a certain ineffable unsatisfactoriness. There is a word to describe this quality, the writer thinks, a horrible word. The B word. He begins to strike his forehead with a sweaty palm.”
― Robert Stone

“Like many visitors, they had been unnerved by the inimitable creepiness of the Holy Sepulchre, a grimly gaudy, theopathical Turkish bathhouse where their childhood saints glared like demented spooks from every moldering wall.”
― Robert Stone, Damascus Gate

“The mixtures of shells and light makes you confused and unhappy. One side employing the force of he other merging. You're one of those people who hears the sun come up.”
― Robert Stone

“Don't be afraid to ask for a rise, Sagittarius. Your boss always pay you less than your work is actually worth!”
― Robert Stone, Dog Soldiers

“The border between the State of Israel and the occupied Gaza Strip had always reminded him of the line between Tijuana and greater San Diego. There, too, ragged men the color of earth waited with the mystical patience of the very poor on the pleasure of crisply uniformed, well-nourished officials. Some months before, Lucas had come down for the dawn shape-up at the checkpoint, and he had not forgotten the drawn faces in the half-light, the terrible smiles of the weak, straining to make themselves agreeable to the strong.”
― Robert Stone, Damascus Gate

“One insight was that the ordinary physical world through which one shuffled heedless and half-assed toward nonentity was capable of composing itself, at any time and without notice, into a massive instrument of agonizing death.”
― Robert Stone, Dog Soldiers

“History, then, is perceived as a rational process, the unfolding of a design, something with a dynamic to be uncovered.”
― Robert Stone, Journalism: The Democratic Craft

“See, it's all a movie in this country and if you wait long enough you get your happy ending. Until somebody else's movie starts.”
― Robert Stone, A Flag for Sunrise

“Sleeping and waking, the notion of being lost, of having wandered out of the right life, kept turning up in different guises. She imagined mirrors in which she could not find herself.”
― Robert Stone, Outerbridge Reach

“He had undertaken a little assay at the good fight and found that neither the good nor the fight was left to him . . . he had gone after life again and they had shown him life and made him eat it.”
― Robert Stone, A Flag for Sunrise

“My optimism? Where I grew up our principal cultural expression was the funeral. Whatever keeps me going, it isn't optimism.”
― Robert Stone, Helping

“He would keep what he would always believe had to be a false memory of her falling like a booted Icarus out of a lighted sky in which there was somehow falling snow and her mouth open in a lovely O that had started to shape a word, and her long legs against the electric light, shooting out of the blue plastic square that rose like a kite lifting on a whirlwind and one of her boots flying what seemed the length of the block”
― Robert Stone, Death of the Black-Haired Girl

“There were icons of the Magdalen on the walls and paintings in the Western manner, all kitsch, trash. Mary M., Lucas thought, half hypnotized by the chanting in the room beside him; Mary Moe, Jane Doe, the girl from Migdal in Galilee turned hooker in the big city. The original whore with the heart of gold. Used to be a nice Jewish girl, and the next thing you know, she's fucking the buckos of the Tenth Legion Fratensis, fucking the pilgrims who'd made their sacrifice at the Temple and were ready to party, the odd priest and Levite on the sly.

"Maybe she was smart and funny. Certainly always on the lookout for the right guy to take her out of the life. Like a lot of whores, she tended towards religion. So along comes Jesus Christ, Mr. Right with a Vengeance, Mr. All Right Now! Fixes on her his hot, crazy eyes and she's all, Anything, I'll do anything. I'll wash your feet with my hair. You don't even have to fuck me.”
― Robert Stone, Damascus Gate

“There's a current running and a pretty stiff offshore breeze." "Merde," said Freycinet again. He went forward along the rail and lay down beside the anchor windlass, peering into the chains. "He's a cook too," Gillian said, speaking softly. "How come you're not more like him?" "An accident of birth," Blessington said. "If we were married," she said, "you wouldn't have to skip on your visa." "Ah," said Blessington, "don't think it hasn't occurred to me. Nice to be a legal resident." "Legal my ass," she said. Freycinet suddenly turned and watched them. He showed them the squint, the bared canines. "What”
― Robert Stone, Bear and His Daughter: Stories

“By the time night fell, their road led upward over the slopes of half-fallen mountains where broken boulders were piled on each other’s backs. In the twilight, the great rocks came to look like statues and the scrub pine growing from the crevices beneath them like offering flowers.”
― Robert Stone, Dog Soldiers