James T. Farrell > Quotes

“If you let conditions stop you from working, they'll always stop you.”
― James T. Farrell

“Life is sad enough without people writing sad books.”
― James T. Farrell, Studs Lonigan

“America is so vast that almost everything said about it is likely to be true, and the opposite is probably equally true.”
― James T. Farrell

“All his life he had wished and waited, and there had been no change, except for the worse.”
― James T. Farrell, Studs Lonigan

“He was sad because he had grown up, and because the years passed like a river that no man could stop.”
― James T. Farrell, Studs Lonigan

“They served the rich, and tried to think that they were rich.”
― James T. Farrell, Studs Lonigan

“His face was a gaze of primal obtuseness.”
― James T. Farrell, Studs Lonigan

“Life was hard on mothers; but then, they just didn't understand.”
― James T. Farrell, Studs Lonigan

“He had come to America, haven of peace and liberty, and it, too, was joining the slaughter, fighting for the big capitalists. There was no peace for men, only murder, cruelty, brutality.”
― James T. Farrell, Studs Lonigan

“He was still where he had always been. Just hoping.”
― James T. Farrell

“He thought of how when you went out and listened to what people said, you heard all kinds of things, people washing their dirty linen in public, talking about friends and business and,gash, and it made him think how the world must be, at every minute, so full of people fighting, and jazzing, and dying, and working, and losing jobs, and it was a funny world, all right, full of funny people, millions of them. And he was only one out of all these millions of people, and they were all trying to get along, and many of them had gotten farther than he.”
― James T. Farrell, Studs Lonigan

“He took a meditative puff on his stogy, and informed himself that time was a funny thing. Old Man Time just walked along, and he didn't even blow a How-do-you-do through his whiskers. He just walked on past you. Things just change.”
― James T. Farrell

“So long, Lee. Give our regards to the Kaiser. And tell him there's a few boys on 58th Street who'll throw a party for him if he'll drop around.”
― James T. Farrell, Studs Lonigan

“He had a picture in his mind of Studs Lonigan courageously telling life and the world to stick itself up it's old tomato.”
― James T. Farrell, Studs Lonigan

“He told himself that he was a clown clean through. Every time a fly ball had been hit to him with men on the bases, he'd muffed it. Hoping for one thing, then another, and when he did get his chances -- foul ball.

Girls, too. He'd never held one. Twice Lucy had given him the cold shoulder. That girl he'd knelt next to at Christmas Mass in Saint Patrick's once -- cold shoulder. Never got beyond wishing with her. Now Catherine.

Football. He'd wanted to be a star high-school quarterback and he'd not had the guts to stay in school. Fighting. His kid brother had even cleaned him up. In the war when he'd tried to enlist, a leather-necked sergeant had laughed at him.

He was just an all-around no soap guy.”
― James T. Farrell, Studs Lonigan

“There was a drugged sanctimoniousness about the sappy-looking birds seated in the lobby. Studs felt that there wasn't a man or a regular guy among them.”
― James T. Farrell, Studs Lonigan A Trilogy

“Literature is one of the most powerful means by which men can talk to men. Basically it is a means of transmitting experience, feeling, and emotion, so that one man can tell others, either in the present on in the future. … The need for literature is something which can be assumed as axiomatic. For centuries, artists have created a literature that has been born of blood, sweat, toil and heartache of countless writers of many lands and many centuries. Literature is the property of mankind.”
― James T. Farrell

“But literature is one of those realms in which man asserts his freedom, his spirit: in literature of a first-rate order, man attains a kind of imaginative freedom in which he asserts, implicitly, that in his spirit, he will not be the slave of fate. He assimilates tragedy, sorrow, and bitterness.”
― James T. Farrell

“Do you remember the first time in your life when you had a dollar all your own and how you spent it?”
― James T. Farrell, My Baseball Diary

“Ever since he had been a kid, he had wished and waited, and there had been no change except for the worst.”
― James T. Farrell, Studs Lonigan