Quotes from William Kennedy

Love, is always insufficient, always a lie. Love, you are the clean shit of my soul. Stupid love, silly love.

Well-lit streets discourage sin, but don't overdo it.

Roscoe was spiritually illegal, a bootlegger of the soul, a mythic creature made of words and wit and wild deeds and boundless memory.

and what if I did drink too much? Whose business is that? Who knows how much I didn't drink?

the only brotherhood they belonged to was the one that asked that enduring question: How do I get through the next twenty minutes? They feared drys, cops, jailers, bosses, moralists, crazies, truth-tellers, and one another. they loved storytellers, liars, whores, fighters, singers, collie dogs that wagged their tails, and generous bandits. Rudy, thought Francis: he's just a bum, but who ain't?

But after awhile you stand up, wipe the frost out of your ear, go someplace to get warm, bum a nickel for coffee, and then start walkin' toward somewheres else that ain't near no bridge.

Let us, then, be up and doing, with a heart for any fate.

One never knows the potential within the human breast.

But fear is a cheap emotion, however full of wisdom. And, emotionally speaking, I've always thought of myself as a man of expensive taste.

Why the hell's he preachin' if he don't preach to people that need it?

It's quite uncanny what one sets in motion by being oneself.

Do something new and you are new. How boring it is not to fire machine guns.

We are only possible as what happened to us yesterday. We all change as well move

Mi culpa es todo lo que me queda. Si la pierdo, no habré significado nada, no habré hecho nada, no habré sido nada.

Katie bar the door.

I liked all their lies best, for I think they are the brightest part of anybody's history.

It stood on the east side of Ten Broeck Street, a three-block street in Arbor Hill named for a Revolutionary War hero and noted in the 1870s and 1880s as the place where a dozen of the city's arriviste lumber barons lived, all in a row, in competitive luxury.

Only a bet on the impossible makes sense. It is an act of faith and courage requiring an irrational leap over reason. A man wins simply by making such a bet.

In the years after the death of Petrus, Hillegond had refused all offers of marriage, certain that her knowledge of men, despite her uncountable intimate encounters with them, was seriously bescrewed. Further, she grew certain from a recurring nightmare that should she ever consider a man as a second spouse, he would strangle her in her bed with a ligature.

He would not chance arrest by crawling into a corner of one of the old houses on Lower Broadway where the cops swept through periodically with their mindless net. What difference did it make whether four or six or eight lost men slept under a roof and out of the wind in a house with broken stairs and holes in the floors you could fall through to death, a house that for five or maybe ten years had been inhabited only by pigeons? What difference?

We could eat, why not? We're sober, so he'll let us in, the bastard. I ate there the other night, had a bowl of soup because I was starvin'. But god it was sour. Them dried-out bums that live there, they sit down and eat like fuckin' pigs, and everything that's left they throw in the pot and give it to you. Slop." "He puts out a good meal, though.

From a manhole in the middle of State Street steam rose and vanished. Francis imagined the subterranean element at the source of this: a huge human head with pipes screwed into its ears, steam rising from a festering skull wound.

Sometimes I wonder what if I run off or dropped dead," Francis said. "Helen'd probably go crazy." "Why if you dropped dead she'd bury you before you started stinkin'," Jack said. "That's all'd happen." "What a heart you have," Francis said. "You gotta bury your dead," Jack said.

Oye, todo es verdad — replicó Francis —. Todo cuanto te pasa por la imaginación, aunque apeste a chorrada, es verdad.