John Barnes > Quotes

“So we fell asleep holding hands. If married couples got to do this all the time, shit if I could understand how there were ever divorces, or even fights.”
― John Barnes, Tales of the Madman Underground

“I think everyone always has time to suffer.”
― John Barnes, Tales of the Madman Underground

“Can I ask you something personal?”

Six inches but I tell everyone eight.”
― John Barnes, Tales of the Madman Underground

“You know, when someone hurts my feelings, somehow it does not comfort me to know that it was deliberate... On the other hand, knowing that someone else thinks they are assholes helps a great deal."
"I think that's some kind of rule for the universe.”
― John Barnes, Tales of the Madman Underground

“Pain only matters when it happens to someone important.”
― John Barnes, Tales of the Madman Underground

“It wasn't that funny, but I laughed. There wouldn't be much laughter in the world if people didn't like each other, because there sure as shit aren't that many good jokes.”
― John Barnes, Tales of the Madman Underground

“... once you were in, they put a note in your file that said you were in therapy, and all your teachers saw that file. They might as well have tattooed CRAZY on your forehead. The next year every teacher would be watching you for the first weird thing you did—and has there ever been a kid who never does anything an adult considers weird?
”
― John Barnes, Tales of the Madman Underground

“People who put principles before people are people who hate people. They don’t much care about how well it works, just about how right it is … they may even like it better if it inflicts enough pain.”
― John Barnes

“There's a rule or something that if a girl can crack you up, you have to do what she says.”
― John Barnes, Tales of the Madman Underground

“I guess when life hands you lemons, chop 'em up and get lemonade; when life hands you cats, chop 'em up and get pussy.”
― John Barnes, Tales of the Madman Underground

“This is not the way these tales end," Calliope said firmly.
"This is not the way that things end when they get to be tales," Amatus said, "but since ours is not yet told, we cannot count on it. There were a hundred dead princes on the thorns outside Sleeping Beauty's castle, and I'm sure many of them were splendid fellows.”
― John Barnes, One for the Morning Glory

“Marti wasn't the type to give up without a fight, especially not if she was very afraid - some people are like that. They lean into the fear.”
― John Barnes, Tales of the Madman Underground

“I wondered if they got to enjoy being normal, to know just how terrific it was, or whether it was just invisible to them like air?”
― John Barnes, Tales of the Madman Underground

“Future Farmers of America. Group who take ag classes and are going to inherit the farm. Hot shit around here, they have a couple guys in every clique, and they stick together, 'cause they know they'll be seeing each other every week for the next sixty years.”
― John Barnes

“I always liked that time of day, when people were shutting up their shops, putting the town to bed for the night, going home to do normal stuff with their normal families. I wonder if they got to enjoy being normal, to know just how terrific it was, or whether it was just invisible to them like air? Sometimes I got so pissed off at how easy the normal people had it that I just wanted to walk down the street shaking them and screaming into their squishy self-satisfied faces.”
― John Barnes, Tales of the Madman Underground

“Useless people are not improved by giving them the impression they are useful.”
― john barnes

“I’ve been thinking,” he said. “Which is not an easy thing for a teacher to admit to.”
― John Barnes, Tales of the Madman Underground

“Slow down, and enjoy that stuff if it’s possible. Kathy doesn’t care what time I leave, only what time I clock out, and she knows sometimes I sleep here when I’m locked out, or have friends over. Everything’s cool as long as I clock out on time.”

She swallowed that big bite she’d rammed in, and said, “Okay. Jeez, I’m so hungry, this stuff is good.”

Ketchup for your fries, miss? I can recommend it—it’s my main source of vitamin C.”

She smiled. “Sure. What does Kathy do if you clock out late?”

Well, a couple times I’ve fallen asleep and done it, and gotten off with a warning. Eventually, though, if I made a habit of it, I’d disappear in the middle of the night, and never be seen again, and the only clues the police would have would be a few orange hairs and some enormous shoe prints. But for a few weeks afterward, all over the country, the Quarter Pounders would taste just a little bit more like Lightsburg, Ohio.”
― John Barnes, Tales of the Madman Underground

“I realized after I got Jesus, I'd marry "that good woman who put me right with the Lord, got me away from the bottle and taught me what life is really all about." Which was to say, some church girl that resembles a pile of loose fat upholstered with pale goopy skin, and whose whole life is chocolate cake and visiting her sister.”
― John Barnes, Tales of the Madman Underground

“Supposedly nobody outside the group knew there was a group. Of course we all knew that wasn't true. High school was like the little clear plastic tunnels that Paul's hamsters lived in: you could run a long way but never get out, and always, everyone could see you.”
― John Barnes, Tales of the Madman Underground

“But I'd been raised pure Ohio: the Zeroth Commandment was Thou Shalt Not Be Any Trouble to Anybody Ever.”
― John Barnes, Tales of the Madman Underground

“I gave up drinking, and the next time I saw Bonny at a party, she was mad at me about that too, and went off and made out all night with Chip Neminech, the tackle who demonstrated that not only is there no I in team, there’s no Q, either. I suppose, given that my mother was a girl, I shouldn’t have been surprised that some of them could get pretty weird.”
― John Barnes, Tales of the Madman Underground

“Don’t underrate ordinary human decency,” Josh said quietly. “There’s more of heaven in a guy who hands a cold soda to a hot, tired panhandler than there is in fifty moral philosophers.”
― John Barnes, Raise the Gipper!

“Romney sounds like he wants to be the nice uncle in a sitcom, Santorum sounds like he wants to be a twelfth-century archbishop, Gingrich sounds like he wants to go to outer space, and Paul sounds like he came from there.”
― John Barnes, Raise the Gipper!

“... they only trusted the wisdom of people brighter and more worldly than themselves when it was expressed in the vocabulary and style of rural idiots. In his guise as Brazenydol, he had once had a contract with DARPA to teach a team of physicists the basic terminology of tractor pulls so that they could give an acceptable explanation of omniwavelength stealth to a Congressional committee that didn’t understand tractor pulls, either.”
― John Barnes, Raise the Gipper!

“A song is not a tool for changing a human heart in the way that a wrench is a tool for changing a bolt, but it was the tool I had, and I was the tool the OSP had.
The cansos in "Songs from Underneath" were not really as subtle as a wrench. Their primary trope was the ancient trick of making the viewpoint character a victim of oppression, because people identify passionately with a strong viewpoint character, and there is intense pleasure in identifying with the narrator of a sad story or song. In "Black Beauty" that trick had made people begin to think that beating horses was bad; it was the trope that make privileged white children burn with outrage at "Native Son" and prudes weep over prostitutes in "Elle frequentait la rue Pigalle" and "My Name is Not Bitch." They also received, at no extra cost, the delicious smug superiority of sympathizing with an underdog, unlike their less-enlightened neighbors.
Their primary”
― John Barnes, The Armies of Memory

“Amatus waited a long time, but at last he broke the silence.
"There is much I don't understand."
"That will never change," Mortis said decisively. "Except that what you don't understand will change.”
― John Barnes, One for the Morning Glory

“I’ve got ten thousand ducks quacking and waddling, with one deluded chicken that thinks it’s a duck in the middle. I think it’s a flock of ducks; Cam thinks it’s a malign conspiracy of chickens.”
― John Barnes, Directive 51

“In the light of the crappy little lamp, all I was looking at was a frizzy mop of blonde hair and a bare back with one big angry red patch on it, but Jesus fucking God she was beautiful, and if you don't understand that, I'm sorry for you.”
― John Barnes, Tales of the Madman Underground

“Going into the Republican Party National Convention, in all objective truth, our non‑winning front‑runners are the sorriest collection of stuffed shirts, empty suits, self‑gratulatory ignorami, and outright wig‑flipped ding‑dongs in the history of the Republic.”
― John Barnes, Raise the Gipper!