All the King's Men

"To get there you follow Highway 58, going northeast out of the city, and it is a good highway and new. Or was new, the day we went up it."

"Hed pop the cube in over the barricade of his twisted black little teeth, and then youd see the thin little mystic Irish cheeks cave in as he sucked the sugar, so that he looked like an undernourished leprechaun."

"If the human race didnt remember anything it would be perfectly happy."

"It may be the reason they dont seem real to you is that you arent very real yourself."

"I owed my success to that principle. It had put me where I was. What you dont know dont hurt you, for it aint real. They called that Idealism in my book I had when I was in college, and after I got hold of that principle I became an Idealist. I was a brass-bound Idealist in those days. If you are an Idealist it does not matter what you do or what goes on around you because it isnt real anyway."

"How life is strange and changeful, and the crystal is in the steel at the point of fracture, and the toad bears a jewel in its forehead, and the meaning of moments passes like the breeze that scarcely ruffles the leaf of the willow."

"If something takes too long, something happens to you. You become all and only the thing you want and nothing else, for you have paid too much for it, too much in wanting and too much in waiting and too much in getting."

"Sometimes sleep gets to be a serious and complete thing. You stop going to sleep in order that you may be able to get up, but get up in order that you may be able to go back to sleep."

"There is nothing more alone than being in a car at night in the rain."

"You see a woman around for a long time and think that she is ugly. You think she is nothing. Then, all of a sudden, you think how she is under that baggy tweed or droopy seersucker. All of a sudden, you see the face which is there under the pock-marked mask and is humble, pure, and trusting and is asking you to lift the mask. It must be like an old man looking at his wife and just for a second seeing the face he had seen thirty years before."

"[Y]ou have to make the good out of the bad because that is all you have to make it out of."

"[W]illie was coming up for re-election and his chances looked about as good as the chances of a flea making a living off a carved marble lion on a monument."