Tom Drury > Quotes

“Accelerated Rehabilitation had a scientific sound, as if Pierre would rehabilitate faster and faster in an elliptical path until evaporating in a blue flash of pure mental health.”
― Tom Drury, The Driftless Area

“After he got hammered one night at a high place about Lens Lake called the Grade, his parents found him standing in the kitchen.
"What if there was a language with only one word in it?" he asked.
"It would be easy to learn," said his mother.
"And with that word they would say everything every time they spoke," said Pierre.
"Yeah, that would be some language," said his father. "What are you on?"
"Just drinking," said Pierre. "Just good old American drinking.”
― Tom Drury, The Driftless Area

“It's not Adventureland, but you write some poems, the leaves move, and you get laid sometimes." Tom Drury's Pierre Hunter on life.”
― Tom Drury

“A face is a kind of a mask anyway, when you think about it," he said.

Rudd took a drink and set the glass down. "You should never ask Pierre anything."

"You don't make your face," said Pierre. "It's given to you. You might think it represents your true self, but why would it? Half the time you make an expression and think, Oh, this is my whatever expression, and nobody even knows what you're thinking.”
― Tom Drury, The Driftless Area

“I really like people. But I don't know how it will end.”
― Tom Drury

“He didn’t have any beliefs to speak of. A world that would deposit a child in a beer carton in the middle of nowhere seemed capable of you-name-it, but Dan did not think that you-name-it qualified as a belief.”
― Tom Drury, The End of Vandalism

“Louise closed her eyes. She could not define what she was feeling but knew no other way to express it than to say that she loved him. So that's what she said. It occurred to her that you only get glimpses of love, your whole life, just bits and pieces.”
― Tom Drury

“PIerre tried to work up a stormy heart of romantic loss about breaking up with Rebecca. It gave him license to drink and brood with hard eyes, which he found interesting.”
― Tom Drury

“It was not that her life was so tragic but that she found gloom more interesting than the everyday world.”
― Tom Drury, The Driftless Area: A Novel

“He had a way of becoming wooden and emotionless just when she needed him to be the opposite.”
― Tom Drury, The End of Vandalism

“Moving along to Channel 7, Dan found an old movie in which a woman was singing on a strange and shadowy stage. She had dark curls, pale eyes, a transparent veil. She sang with great power. Her voice soared and trembled—it was hard to tell if she was in control. Violinists and harpists played behind her, and candles shook in the hands of the choir. The piece was almost over, climbing toward some destructive note. Then the camera pulled back, revealing that the woman was singing in an amphitheater in a landscape of dark towers and hills. Was this supposed to be Heaven? Hell? Italy? Dan could not say.”
― Tom Drury, The End of Vandalism