Padgett Powell > Quotes

“If the observation were made to you that "Strangers become intimate, and as intimacy grows they lower their guards and less mind their manners until errors are made, which decreases intimacy until estrangement exceeds that which existed before the strangers ever met," would you be inclined to agree?”
― Padgett Powell, The Interrogative Mood

“Life is a sandwich of activity between two periods of bed-wetting,”
― Padgett Powell, The Interrogative Mood

“The main thing is: Don't take any shit.
That's the main thing.
The unmain thing is: You are not going to figure anything out except how to get other people to take shit, so forget about everything except not taking any yourself.”
― Padgett Powell, Typical: Stories

“Have you come over time to think that you know more now than you did when you were young, know less now than when young, know now there is so much more to know than you knew there was to know when young that it is moot whether you think you knew more then than now or less, or do you now know that you never knew anything at all and never will and only the bluster of youth persuaded you that you did or would?”
― Padgett Powell, The Interrogative Mood

“Is a gesture of charity genuine or is it a kind of deep moral tax write-off?”
― Padgett Powell, The Interrogative Mood

“Potato salad in the South is nothing less than the principal smuggler of cholesterol into the festive, careless heart. It is pure poison beneath the facade of bland puritan propriety. It is the food of choice at any food banquet of smiling relatives who celebrate tacitly among themselves the dark twining of two of their promising youth.”
― Padgett Powell, Edisto Revisited

“Now she understood a few things: that the American academy, which one might have thought the place to defend freedom of speech, had been the seat and soul of abrogating freedom of speech, if the first assault on its freedom can be said to be restricting, or handcuffing speech. The day she heard “redneck” on NPR, she turned NPR off, not because broadcasters were still using the term, but because she knew one day they would not be. In fact, she had a vision of the quiet moment backstage at a Boston studio when a good, surprised correspondent was let go for saying “redneck” the last time it would be said.”
― Padgett Powell, Mrs. Hollingsworth's Men

“If you could have a famous writer, dead or alive, write an obituary for you and really puff you up to have been something you weren’t, perhaps, or otherwise take liberties with your memory, what writer would you choose?”
― Padgett Powell, The Interrogative Mood

“Have you seen a person recently so delicious-looking that, were you and this person to be scrambling for ice-cream change with your arms in the sofa and your faces laid on the cushions looking at each other as you felt for coins and the ice-cream truck dinged on by and your hands in there felt only the lint of the sofa scrofula and your faces were fairly close across a distance of that knobby nylon terrain, you might feel compelled to slide you face toward this delicious-looking person’s and kiss him or her - have you seen anyone like this recently?”
― Padgett Powell, The Interrogative Mood

“the levity of the doomed has no equal.”
― Padgett Powell, Mrs. Hollingsworth's Men

“Do you appreciate that an oyster has, among its other organs, a heart?”
― Padgett Powell, The Interrogative Mood

“The Father wipes the silver chalice with a beautiful linen rag large as a small tablecloth, turns the cup two inches each time to keep you from having to drink where the last worshipper lipped it, as if that takes care of the germs. But I don’t care, I always reach out very piously—that’s to say, in slow motion, the way you move for some reason to take and eat the body of Our Savior—reach out and lay my hand over the Father’s in somber reverence to the moment and then press down as the silver rim clears my upper lip and suck a slug of wine that should have fed six communers. I have to, because the bread of His body is stuck to the roof of my mouth like a rubber tire patch, and if I can’t wash it loose by swishing His blood around, I’m going to have to dig it off with a finger, in slow motion, and possibly gag. When”
― Padgett Powell, Edisto

“Would it require more energy than you have in order for you to really lose it, or do you think really losing it can be a function of having too little energy to prevent losing it? Do the people you do not wish to talk to far exceed the number you do wish to talk to? Do you have much to say to even those to whom you do wish to speak? Do you know where it went wrong for you? Do you own any good copper? Are you favorably disposed to American Indian causes but less so if you must say Native American causes? Are you more at ease in a veneer of civilization or in a true hardwood of barbary?”
― Padgett Powell, The Interrogative Mood

“But crossing into Louisiana I got this haunted little rill of feeling -- there was moss and mud everywhere and an inexplicable, hollow sensation that Louisiana is what would be left of the South after it has been nuked -- that I and everything around me were irretrievably rotten.”
― Padgett Powell, Edisto Revisited

“Writing is a failure. Writing is not only useless, it's spoiled paper.”
― Padget Powell

“Cholesterol to go with alcohol; all the bad things in English-speaking life end in -ol.”
― Padgett Powell, Edisto Revisited

“If I tell you that I have robbed a bank, prepare the correct reaction.”
― Padgett Powell, The Imperative Mood

“Is there enough time left? Does it matter that I do not specify for what? Was there ever enough time? Was there once too much? Does the notion of “enough time” actually make any sense? Does it suggest we had things to do and could not do them for reasons other than that we were incompetents? Did we have things to do? Things better done than not? Thus, important things? Are there important things? Are we as a species rolling together the great dungball of the importantly done into itself and making thereby a better world for the dungball rollers to follow us?”
― Padgett Powell, The Interrogative Mood

“Have you decided yet what historical moment you would have most like to have witnessed with your own eyes and ears?”
― Padgett Powell, The Interrogative Mood

“life is a time when you get pleasure until somebody get your ass. and one of the ways to prolong pleasure is to not chop up time with syllables.”
― Padgett Powell

“in a new world behave in a new way as a new man. unhorse the conquistador.”
― Padgett Powell, 5 Stories and a Piece of You & Me

“You don't have to pay me to tell you this but this a dream born of depression. That's all it is.

So what do I do?

No idea. Stay awake.

Good idea.”
― Padgett Powell, You & Me

“You can't disturb a nobody with evidence he's a nobody. A nobody is not disturbed by anything significant.”
― Padgett Powell, Typical: Stories

“My mother will emerge with a towel on her head, Nefertiti fashion, and a good terry-cloth robe, and make herself a tall gin-and-tonic and look like a movie star for an hour. Being around her is like being on safari; there is an elusive something we are after, in difficult conditions, and we will look good in the getting there.”
― Padgett Powell, Edisto Revisited

“Isn't it true that there is a rare kind of person who perceives, as does a good dog, that life is doing something meaningful, and who discovers what it is and goes about doing it with a spirit of moderate hustle, and there is a not rare kind of person who perceives none of this and who goes about doing what is necessary in a spirit of aggrievedness?”
― Padgett Powell, The Interrogative Mood

“alternate the theories you entertain about all things.”
― Padgett Powell, The Imperative Mood

“the zombies, after all, were pretty slow to appreciate someone other than themselves, and they had been schooled not to denigrate the different.

--Mrs. Hollingsworth's Men”
― padgett powell

“Do you try to listen to calssical music but feel you don't ever really advance past knowing it's better than it sounds?”
― Padgett Powell, The Interrogative Mood

“in the event that armed men of any sort enter the building, watch their feet closely.”
― Padgett Powell, The Imperative Mood

“Can you imagine doing something in your life that will be fully satisfying and redeeming for your having tried to do it, whether you succeeded in it or failed, and that, correspondingly, would be fully shameful had you not tried to do it?”
― Padgett Powell, The Interrogative Mood