Laurence Shames > Quotes

“Success and failure. We think of them as opposites, but they're really not. They're companions - the hero and the sidekick.”
― Laurence Shames

“Why are we inspired by another person's courage? Maybe because it gives us the sweet and genuine surprise of discovering some trace, at least, of the same courage in ourselves.”
― Laurence Shames

“One of the things Key West teaches is that disappointment and contentment can go together more easily than you would probably imagine.”
― Laurence Shames, The Naked Detective

“Consumption kept the workers working, which kept the paychecks coming, which kept the people spending, which kept the investors investing, which meant there was more to consume. The system, properly understood, was independent of values and needed no philosophy to prop it up. It was a perfect circle, complete in itself - and empty in the middle.”
― Laurence Shames, The Hunger for More: Searching for Values in an Age of Greed

“When a marriage works, it is in no small part because a woman and a man have come to recognize in precise measure when enough has been said.”
― Laurence Shames, Sunburn

“There's a look that two people share when it is inevitable that they're becoming lovers; that they've become lovers, in spirit if not yet in deed. The look is the bond that sex confirms.”
― Laurence Shames, The Naked Detective

“Art happens when a person of talent is seized with nervous energy and discovers that he or she has nothing to do except create.”
― Laurence Shames, Scavenger Reef

“On thick-built men like Joe Mulvane, they tend to bind around the thighs, the back seam has an annoying tendency to crawl between the buttocks. When such men sit and lean forward, say, against a bar, the waistband of their trousers binds them in the belly, while at the base of their spines an unattractive gap appears and seems to tug their shirttails out as well as to create a natural channel for sweat to pour. A belt doesn't close the trench in back; it only presents a retaining wall that bites into the flesh below the navel.”
― Laurence Shames, Scavenger Reef

“You have reached the home and workplace of Roberto Natchez. I do not often take calls. I make no promise to return them. I have much to do. You may leave a message if you wish.”
― Laurence Shames, Scavenger Reef

“. . . every day's an adventure if you approach it with the proper attitude. You never know when you might see or smell something you've never seen or smelled before. Of find a new friend, either on two legs or on four. Or when life might throw at you another chance to be a hero. Maybe that'll never happen, but what if it does? The trick, I think, is to be relaxed but always ready, friendly but alert. Don't go chasing after trouble, but don't back down and don't wimp out if trouble finds you.”
― Laurence Shames, Nacho Unleashed

“In Joey's neighborhood the blocks were short and there were stop signs on every corner. It was hard to get going more than fifteen miles an hour, and on those lazy streets Joey's refurbished 1973 El Dorado convertible got about eight blocks to the gallon.”
― Laurence Shames, Sunburn

“He would be the kind of friend he wished he had, and so perhaps become worthy of having such a friend himself.”
― Laurence Shames, Scavenger Reef

“It’s none of your business what I’m aware of.”
― Laurence Shames, Nacho Unleashed

“My advice is that, inna famous words of Abraham Lincoln unless maybe it was George Washington or from a movie I saw sometime, who knows, is that the truth is your friend, even when it sure as shit don’t look that way, and now that I think of it, it mighta been what’s-his-name, Clint Eastbrook, but where I’m goin’ wit’ this is that if you’re tryin’ to get somewhere, pretty much anywhere, the shortest route is by way of the truth, which, by the way, prob’ly also has the least traffic whereas Bullshit Boulevard is always jammed.”
― Laurence Shames, Relative Humidity

“Key West—a town of people passing through, looking around, waiting, hoping for something special to happen, then not having a clue what was going on when it did.”
― Laurence Shames, Florida Straits

“everybody but me seemed so cool and so blasé about the various and sundry crimes they had committed.”
― Laurence Shames, The Naked Detective

“Over time, Richie had noticed that it was almost always the people you really didn’t want to look at who just couldn’t wait to strip in public. Men or women, it really didn’t seem to matter. The less photogenic the body, the more of it was bared to the sunshine, the salt-and-chlorine breezes, the neighbors’ captive eyeballs. Why? Was it purely about freedom and courage and lack of inhibition? Was it a passive sort of in-your-face aggression, a demand to”
― Laurence Shames, Sunset Bluff

“Maybe it was just Bert’s deep familiarity with the place that made it precious; maybe familiarity alone”
― Laurence Shames, Sunset Bluff

“Well, anyway,” Joey went on blithely, “few years ago this guy calls me up. ‘Joey,’ he says, ‘I got big problems. The vacation market is in the shits, I can’t pay my mortgage. What should I do?’ I say, ‘How about you put some fucking pants on and get a job?’ He says, ‘I have no pants.’ I say, ‘I’ll buy you some.’ ‘No,’ he says. ‘Fuck pants.”
― Laurence Shames, Shot on Location

“upside-down to get a spark just before they were runnin’ outta gas and sometimes it would burn your fingers…But wait, where were we goin’ wit’ this?”
― Laurence Shames, Sunset Bluff

“Sleeping and waking—for him the states grew ever less distinct. Sleep gained in truth as waking lost the arrogance of certainty. Dreams, three-D and portentous, sported a logic no less satisfactory than that of what, by mere consensus, was called the real. Categories dissolved; things floated free of their names, and a kind of geriatric Buddhism became ever more unquestioned and serene.”
― Laurence Shames, Mangrove Squeeze

“Brutality was a virus, once it entered a life it stayed there; it lurked in the organs, it waited with a patient malice, it could take over any time.”
― Laurence Shames, Sunburn

“so I tip my cap that you broke through to find that little spark a decency that dwells in all of us, or at least we like to think it does, or at least it does inna movies, but then again, the question is, was it really worth diggin’ through all the brutality and bullshit to find that little spark, dim and flickerin’ though it may be, sometimes almost, whaddyacallit, extinguished altogether, like the way ya used to have to turn the old Zippo lighters”
― Laurence Shames, Sunset Bluff

“With the usual snarls and sneers he read the dismal unreal news briefs from the outside world, terse by-the-way accounts of coups and famines, scandals and indictments, riots and revolutions. In everything he read he saw confirmation of what he knew: that the truth was everywhere suppressed, fakery in gross but temporary triumph. In Africa as in Russia, in politics as in culture, the appalling pattern held: Lying mediocrity prospered while deep honesty could only fume and seethe and starve, and so it would continue until there was a Liberator clear-eyed enough to show the world its vileness, and strong and cruel enough to root the vileness out.”
― Laurence Shames, Scavenger Reef

“His father was not a man to make a habit of offering his upturned throat.”
― Laurence Shames, Florida Straits

“But coming halfway clean was a time- honored way of continuing to lie.”
― Laurence Shames, The Naked Detective

“but what was devotion if not the habit and the piling up of small considerations?”
― Laurence Shames, The Naked Detective

“There are towns, you know, for making money. Towns to start a career. Towns to go to college. Towns to raise a family. Key West is no damn good for any of that. Key West is to feel good and be happy. That's all.”
― Laurence Shames, Scavenger Reef

“An old man's errors mattered both more and less than a young man's. More because there was less time to undo them; less because there was less time to endure their consequences.”
― Laurence Shames, Florida Straits

“You listened so you would learn; you thought so that your answer would not return to humiliate or harm you, because, in Paulie's world, once something was said it could not be called back or explained away.”
― Laurence Shames, Virgin Heat