Pete Dexter > Quotes

“I was tired in ways that had nothing to do with sleep. It occurred to me, sitting in the car with her, that I had been trying to hold too many things together that were meant to fall apart.”
― Pete Dexter, The Paperboy

“In the beginning the stories were long and colored, but as he grew old and his eyes clouded, the stories were told in only a few words, and she came to understand that all the colors had fallen away from him, leaving only the moments. A woman who performed tricks in the air, an animal pulling a boat under water, dead children who spoke in bones. A man who loved bottles.”
― Pete Dexter, Deadwood

“Sometimes," he said, "you've got to watch people a long time to see who they are.”
― Pete Dexter, The Paperboy

“Nothing looks more foolish than tradition to those who have none.”
― Pete Dexter, The Paperboy

“Spooner noticed another, smaller Marine Corps tattoo encircling Marlin's ankle: Semper Fi Forever. Everywhere he went these days, Spponer witnessed America's crying need for more copy editors.”
― Pete Dexter, Spooner

“To see certain things, you have to be lying on your back with tears in your eyes and a scalding potato in your mouth. It's possible, I think, that you have to be hurt to see anything at all.”
― Pete Dexter, The Paperboy

“It is now 55 years since my last book report, which is a long time to live with a guilty conscience. So here it is: In the spring of 1956 I wrote a highly favorable review of the Bible without reading a word of it, and it was the last A I ever got in English. Why it has taken so long to come clean I'm not sure, except I have always been extremely sensitive about my academic reputation.”
― Pete Dexter

“A newspaper story, like anything else, is more attractive from a distance, when it first comes to you, than it is when you get in close and agonize over the details. Which I presume is how Yardley got in the habit of keeping himself at a distance.”
― Pete Dexter, The Paperboy

“...fill the holes with facts, not flowers.”
― Pete Dexter, The Paperboy

“Not for the first time Spooner was reminded that marriage was not the straighforward assembly the instruction book led you to believe.”
― Pete Dexter

“He scart me," the girl said.

Miss Mary nodded and looked over at her in a slow, tired way. "That's your common sense talkin'," she said. "That man scare anybody got common sense.”
― Pete Dexter, Paris Trout

“I had noticed, even then, that there were certain women whom other women instinctively disliked, and that these women invariably had more bait in the water than the women who disliked them.”
― Pete Dexter, The Paperboy

“He was a newspaperman,' he said, 'but there's some people who should never leave Savannah.”
― Pete Dexter, The Paperboy

“and low-life cable network producers, who have never had a thought in their heads that did not come from something else they saw on cable television, are so unthreatened by me that they feel safe stealing my stuff and claiming to have had sudden strokes of genius.”
― Pete Dexter, Paper Trails: True Stories of Confusion, Mindless Violence, and Forbidden Desires, a Surprising Number of Which Are Not About Marriage

“From my own experience, I can tell you that there are mornings when you sit down at the typewriter and knock out three pages in forty-five minutes, and you look at yourself in the toaster over breakfast and your head’s all misshapen and pointy, and you say, “Son, you were born with talent.”
― Pete Dexter, Paper Trails: True Stories of Confusion, Mindless Violence, and Forbidden Desires, a Surprising Number of Which Are Not About Marriage

“[He] did not understand women. It wasn't the way bartenders or comedians didn't understand women, it was the way poor people didn't understand the economy. You could stand outside the Girard Bank Building every day of your life and never guess anything about what went on in there. That's why, in their hearts, they'd always rather stick up a 7-Eleven.”
― Pete Dexter, God's Pocket

“No one mentions that now, and I suppose no one is inclined to bring it up, particularly not my father, who in other matters loves those things most that he can no longer touch or see, things washed clean of flaws and ambiguity by the years he has held them in his memory, reshaping them as he brings them out, again and again, telling his stories until finally the stories, and the things in them, are as perfect and sharp as the edge of the knife he keeps in his pocket.”
― Pete Dexter, The Paperboy

“...without moving a muscle in his face, slips away; retreats, I think, to that sheltered place where his stories are kept. Perhaps we all have our places.”
― Pete Dexter, The Paperboy

“- Charley Utter & Wild Bill Hickock approach Deadwood…

… following the Whitewood Creek, & where things widened enough for a town sign, that was Deadwood.

“How's it look to you?” Bill said.

“Like something out of the Bible,” Charley said.

“What part of the Bible?” Bill said, when they were alone again.

“Where God got angry” Charley said.”
― Pete Dexter

“Leon Hubbard died ten minutes into lunch break on the first Monday in May, on the construction site of the new one-storey trauma wing at Holy Redeemer Hospital in South Philadelphia. One way or the other, he was going to lose the job.”
― Pete Dexter, God's Pocket

“But somewhere in the years here, things began to change. Not just at Channel 10, but at all the stations. And not just in Philadelphia, all over the country. What happened was local news became a big-money proposition. And the people who knew the most about making money—the guys from sales and promotion—became the station managers and they ran the news. And being from sales and promotion, they didn’t know anything about news. And they still don’t.”
― Pete Dexter, Paper Trails: True Stories of Confusion, Mindless Violence, and Forbidden Desires, a Surprising Number of Which Are Not About Marriage

“All in all, he felt more milked than loved.”
― Pete Dexter, Deadwood

“He looked at a story about a new gun they had out in California that spit seventy rounds in four seconds. They called it the "Peace Conservator." They were always doing some damn thing in California that nobody had thought out the consequences.”
― Pete Dexter, Deadwood

“He thought sometimes of leaving to look for Agnes Lake, but his thoughts of her were like dreams, and in his dreams Deadwood was where she was, and he was afraid he would lose her if he left.”
― Pete Dexter, Deadwood

“She had to yell because the lawn mower had no muffler. “What in the world are you doing?” she said. The words fogged in the morning air, and now baby Spooner turned in her arms and was looking at him, smiling. The baby, only a couple of months old, already got him completely, understood everything that mattered. He looked from one of them to the other, and the expressions on their faces could have been bookends for the entire encyclopedia of human experience.”
― Pete Dexter, Spooner

“now. “There is”
― Pete Dexter, Paris Trout

“It was quiet while they both fit their cigars this way and that in their mouths and thought about the nature of peeders. After a while the bartender said, “I expect that’s what keeps a whorehouse in business.” Charley said, “What keeps it in business is those that would otherwise go without. There’s miners come in every week, don’t even take off their pants.” “I heard of that, they just talk.” “It’s to have somebody know they’re here.”
― Pete Dexter, Deadwood

“It seemed like the time to mention Abilene, where Bill shot Mike Williams. Mike was the only man Bill ever killed by accident, to Charley's knowledge. He was a policeman--they'd had an election and the winners hired their nephews as policemen, after Bill had made the place safe to be a policeman--and it was the luck of things that when Phil Coe came after Bill in the street, Mike Williams came around a corner and Bill shot him through the head, thinking it was one of Phil Coe's brothers. Then he shot Phil.

The newspaper wouldn't let it heal. It brought Mike Williams back from the dead every week, like a blood relative. The editor called him a fine specimen of Kansas manhood, and declared a "Crusade to
Rid Abilene and the State of Kansas of Wild Bill and All His Ilk." Those were the exact words, because for a while after that Bill called him "Ilk."

It wasn't the newspaper that got Bill and Charley out of Kansas, though. It was a petition. It was left with the clerk at the hotel where they stayed, three hundred and sixteen signatures asking Bill to leave, not a word of gratitude for what he'd done. He sat down in the lobby with the petition in his lap, running his fingers through his hair. He read every name--there were six sheets of them--and when he finished a sheet, he'd hand it to Charley and he'd read it too.

It was the worst back-shooting Charley had ever seen; they even let the women sign. Bill shrugged and smiled, but some of the names hurt him. He thought he'd had friends in Kansas, and looking at the names he saw they were all afraid of him.

What ran Wild Bill out of Abilene was hurt feelings.”
― Pete Dexter, Deadwood

“Tim,” I said, “what do you say to driving over to City Hall and shooting some birds off the clothespin tonight?” Tim didn’t think we ought to, but he thanked me for thinking of him. I walked back to the seat at the bar and spoke to a woman in the next seat who claimed to believe hunting pigeons was morally repugnant. I said, “Lady, you never saw a pigeon in your life that didn’t look like it was losing a contact lens.” “That is exactly the point,” she said. “The point,” I said—please, Jesus, don’t let them always tell me what the point is—“is maturity. And graciousness.” And hours later, lying next to my sleeping wife—moonlight fell across her hair on the pillow and just a hint of a whistle rose from her lips—I was still struck dumb by the same thing. “I just can’t get over how mature he is,” I said. She opened one eye, but I could see it wasn’t a bedroom eye, even before she spoke. “You’re shit-brained drunk, aren’t you?” she said. Allow me to speak to that now, in public, where there are no pillows to hide under to avoid the answer. It is a fact of life, I think, that some of us are born with talent and some of us are born with shit for brains. Maturity comes into it later, when you try to figure out which way you are. From my own experience, I can tell you that there are mornings when you sit down at the typewriter and knock out three pages in forty-five minutes, and you look at yourself in the toaster over breakfast and your head’s all misshapen and pointy, and you say, “Son, you were born with talent.” And there are other days, often the following day, after you have read those three pages, when you say, “Son, you were born with shit for brains.”
― Pete Dexter, Paper Trails: True Stories of Confusion, Mindless Violence, and Forbidden Desires, a Surprising Number of Which Are Not About Marriage

“And the justice in this world is that you don’t have to break legs because somebody’s broken yours.”
― Pete Dexter, Paper Trails: True Stories of Confusion, Mindless Violence, and Forbidden Desires, a Surprising Number of Which Are Not About Marriage