Louis Bayard > Quotes

“I'm a man of a certain age - old enough to have been every kind of fool- and I find to my surprise that the only counsel I have to pass on is this: Never let your name be found in a dead man's trousers.”
― Louis Bayard, The Black Tower

“Well, as to that, all I'll say is, you can't take out a fellow's heart before he's ready to give it up.”
― Louis Bayard, The Pale Blue Eye

“I've often thought a blind man could find his way through London simply by gauging the changes in innuendo: mild through Trafalgar Square, less veiled towards the river.”
― Louis Bayard, Mr. Timothy

“There are times," I declared, "when I believe the dead haunt us because we love them too little.”
― Louis Bayard, The Pale Blue Eye

“My next thought was for Lord Suckling’s charming song: ‘I prithee send me back my heart / Since I cannot have thine.”
― Louis Bayard, The Pale Blue Eye

“I'm a solitary sort, I get chaffed by too many elbows.”
― Louis Bayard, The Pale Blue Eye

“He became, in that instant, pure topography: his belly a highland, tapering down to a head-hamlet, with two hard-blinking eye-ponds. Four servants rushed to his aid. He waved them off with a smile. Made”
― Louis Bayard, The Pale Blue Eye

“You are asking us to lie, Colonel?"
"I am asking you to omit. Surely, amidst the...the infinite gradations of human venality, that particular sin ranks low." The old man kneaded the folds of his throat. "What happened out there belongs out there. The jungle has it; let the jungle keep it...”
― Louis Bayard, Roosevelt's Beast

“Such a nice little pastiche. Of course, a true Elizbethan theater wouldn't have a roof, would it? Or such comfortable chairs. All the same quite charming.I wonder what play they're putting on now?

Oh, its ... Love's Labour Lost.

Well, isn't that apropos?

Is it?

I wonder if it's modern dress. No, I don't wonder at all.On that particular question, I have been quite driven from the firld. Everywhere one goes now it's Uzis at Agincourt, Imogen in jeans, the Thane of Cawdor in a three-button suit. Nest thing you know, Romeo and Julie will simply text each other. Damn the balcony. OMG,Romeo. ILY 24-7.”
― Louis Bayard, The School of Night

“It won’t do, gentlemen. I’m a solitary sort, I get chaffed by too many elbows.”
― Louis Bayard, The Pale Blue Eye

“I look back on the poor benighted creature I was before I met her, and I see a dead man. Marching in all the right directions, answering when spoken to, fulfilling all his appointed rounds, but dead all the same. And now this woman has awakened me, and I am alive at last, and at what cost! What pain it is to be among the living!”
― Louis Bayard, The Pale Blue Eye

“There are times," I declared, "when I believe the dead haunt us because we love
them too little.”
― Louis Bayard, The Pale Blue Eye

“For reasons I have yet to define, Signor Arpelli stood out from his colleagues. The curled brim of his hat, perhaps. A certain mingling of gravity and levity- I thought the masks of Janus had merged in his eyes.”
― Louis Bayard, Mr. Timothy

“The first Snow, Landor! Rare bliss it was to awaken and to find every tree and rock overrun with snow; to find the snowflakes still spilling like hoarded coins from the sky’s cloud-purses.”
― Louis Bayard, The Pale Blue Eye

“Here was the thing about traveling down an uncharted river: You could only say how long you'd been traveling; you could never say how long it would be.”
― Louis Bayard, Roosevelt's Beast

“Men don’t always know what they need. That’s why God made women.”
― Louis Bayard, Courting Mr. Lincoln

“Joshua said nothing, for his mind was even now limning the vacancy. Lincoln would no more be seated on the far side of the dining table. He would no more ride his horse into town or let his huge hands rove through the library of stroll past the hemp house or listen to Eliza gabble or applaud Mary's nocturnes or argue some abstruse point of law with James or scratch behind Growler's ears as the dog lay stretched around his feet. From henceforth, there would be only space where Lincoln used to be.
And in Joshua's mind, that space began to expand and deepen until it became a vast nullity, blanketing everything around him until it seemed the night itself had been swallowed up by it.”
― Louis Bayard, Courting Mr. Lincoln

“I answered that quite to the contrary, I considered Death—and in particular, the death of a beautiful woman—to be Poetry’s grandest, most exalted theme.”
― Louis Bayard, The Pale Blue Eye

“I was given a room overlooking Constitution Island. The shutters kept out nearly all the starlight and moonlight—sleeping was a dive into a pit, and the sound of reveille seemed to come from a distant star. I lay there, watching the red light steal through the bottom of the shutters. The darkness felt delicious. I wondered if maybe I’d missed my true career.”
― Louis Bayard, The Pale Blue Eye

“Books, Mr. Landor!” “I do read, yes.” Not much of a library—a scant three rows in all—but mine. Poe’s fingers glided along the bindings.”
― Louis Bayard, The Pale Blue Eye

“So as not to be murdered twice over. “Other times,” I continued, “I believe we love them too much. And as a consquence they are never free to depart, because we carry them, our most deeply beloved, within ourselves. Never dead, never silent, never appeased.”
― Louis Bayard, The Pale Blue Eye

“There are times,” I declared, “when I believe the dead haunt us because we love them too little. We forget them, you see; we don’t mean to, but we do.”
― Louis Bayard, The Pale Blue Eye

“I’m the one who feeds the lions their raw meat.”
― Louis Bayard, Courting Mr. Lincoln

“I hide myself within my flower,
That wearing on your breast,
You, unsuspecting, wear me too—
And angels know the rest. I hide myself within my flower,
That, fading from your vase,
You, unsuspecting, feel for me
Almost a loneliness. —Emily Dickinson”
― Louis Bayard, Courting Mr. Lincoln

“Many a woman has been won without ever being wooed.”
― Louis Bayard, Courting Mr. Lincoln

“believe, it is the height of love to—to release a loved one.”
― Louis Bayard, Courting Mr. Lincoln

“From henceforth, there would be only the space where Lincoln used to be. And in Joshua’s mind, that space began to expand and deepen until it became a vast nullity, blanketing everything round him until it seemed the night itself had been swallowed up by it.”
― Louis Bayard, Courting Mr. Lincoln

“I looked down at that sleeping head with its thin, rumpled hair, and I realized then that I had come to organize my days around—around Poe, I guess, or at least around these moments. They had become part of my mind’s calendar, and I depended on them, the way you depend on seasons to follow one another or the back door to stick or your cat to grab the same splash of sunlight every aftertoon.”
― Louis Bayard, The Pale Blue Eye

“If we are to speak of uncompensated labor,” returned James, “then my brother and I were forced to spend nearly half of every year in the hemp fields. Father gave us no preference over the Negroes. We worked side by side with them. Swam and wrestled with them, did everything they did.” “And then you came back,” said Lincoln, “to this charming house, with its fifteen rooms. And consoled yourself the whole time that your labor would end. And, every Fourth of July, you raised a glass to liberty—as did I, good republican. Only whose liberty were we toasting? And who, outside of our own nation, would call it by that name?”
― Louis Bayard, Courting Mr. Lincoln

“Well, I knew then what my own career was to be. I was to become one of those helpless, sad women. I used to notice them when I was young. It seemed to me their lives had slipped away when they weren’t looking, and the only thing they could do was”—she contemplates her silverware, strewn across the tabletop—“polish.”
― Louis Bayard