Jon Clinch > Quotes

“There's nothing else in this world the color of a school bus. They call it yellow but it's not quite yellow, and it's not orange either. I'd say it's something somewhere in between margarine and Velveeta. It's not a natural color. Then again I guess if we wanted kids to grow up natural we wouldn't put them on a school bus in the first place.”
― Jon Clinch, Kings of the Earth

“Under a low sun, pursued by fish and mounted by crows and veiled in a loud swarm of bluebottle flies, the body comes down the river like a deadfall stripped clean.”
― Jon Clinch , Finn

“The inscrutable outpourings bend and intermix, each one a tributary unto the others, until the whole expands ineluctably into a spiraling morass that drowns the mouths from which it has come and subsumes the space almost entirely in black Finn (p112).”
― Jon Clinch

“You owe some things to the dead even if they're not your own dead. I guess in some way they're all your own.”
― Jon Clinch, Kings of the Earth

“Among all of the powers and principalities, there is none on earth so mighty as a man's unsatisfied desire.”
― Jon Clinch, Finn

“When he is done he feels not a burden removed from his shoulders and not an easing of his load but a strange sagging sense of disappointment, as if...he has deflated something whose power might have raised him up.”
― Jon Clinch, Finn

“So you try to understand how people think, and sometimes it surprises you. People don't always see things the same way you see them. But if you listen carefully enough - respectfully enough - and if you pay attention to the things that matter to people, sometimes you'll hear a story that not only explains things you already know, like the burst blood vessels and the urine in the bed, but things you haven't even heard about yet, like Vernon Proctor's not having had cancer in the first place. And how he might die from it anyhow. When those things start coming together, you start thinking maybe you know anything. Which I suppose is why they invented the courts.”
― Jon Clinch, Kings of the Earth

“I didn't mean any harm.' For who truly means harm in all this world.”
― Jon Clinch, Finn

“This place has been here from the beginning and it will be here in the end: Adams County, hacked from the wilderness by naming's brutal baptism long before Illinois was a state or a territory or even so much as a dream.”
― Jon Clinch, Finn

“He is between worlds, this boy. Between the river and the town, between the hogshead and the house, between the taint of his mother and the stain of his pap. He knows some things that he can never say, not even to himself.”
― Jon Clinch, Finn

“The candelabra were”
― Jon Clinch, Belzoni Dreams of Egypt

“The spotlight is a demanding place, Fan. I have always found the shadows to be much more amenable.”
― Jon Clinch, Marley

“Maybe a little,” says Jacob. “You see, it’s not my wife who needs a favor. It’s my son.” “First your wife, and now your son? It’s as I always say. There is no host in the”
― Jon Clinch, The Thief of Auschwitz

“and gives him a sheepish look as she hands them over. “Now kerosene,” he says. “That lamp on your table.” “Yes sir,” she says, unscrewing the tank. “This is just what we need to burn away that thing. Shall we take the entire bunk outdoors? Burn it in the yard? I’m sure whichever way you choose will be the”
― Jon Clinch, The Thief of Auschwitz

“An educated man possesses the future and a diploma to carry into it. A self-made man has only his past, and he must forever be trotting it out for inspection.”
― Jon Clinch, The General and Julia

“He looks to her like the very ghost of himself, come back from the future to provide her with a warning.”
― Jon Clinch, Marley

“How many people, even good Jews, know that the word ghetto comes straight from Italy. Italy of all places. You’d think Germany. Poland.”
― Jon Clinch, The Thief of Auschwitz

“voices and scuffling feet. A girl and a boy, he thinks, but he can’t be certain. By the sound of it, their mother goes with them. That leaves Vollmer waiting alone in the dining room. Chaim leads the way once the water has come to a boil. With white linen draped over his arms and”
― Jon Clinch, The Thief of Auschwitz

“The situation is unendurable, and yet he endures.”
― Jon Clinch, Marley

“What sort of Englishman is forever too busy for tea? The nose-to-the-grindstone sort, to begin with. The sort who gets ahead without connections, who makes something of himself without benefit of small talk or social lubrication or the seeking of personal kindnesses.”
― Jon Clinch, Marley

“The orchestra concludes to a merry burst of applause and the orchestra slides into a waltz—a much-needed chance for the dancers to catch their breath, perhaps even an opportunity for the whispering of urgent secrets and tender promises...”
― Jon Clinch, Marley

“Scrooge is no Marley, and Marley is no Scrooge, and their partnership is the better for it.”
― Jon Clinch

“Everything changes, he thinks. The woman is gone and the world turns.”
― Jon Clinch, Finn