8 Quotes by Frederick Exley

L'amour, bande de connards ! A quoi ça rime, sinon, de vivre ?

Unlike some men, I had never drunk for boldness or charm or wit; I had used alcohol for precisely what it was, a depressant to check the mental exhilaration produced by extended sobriety.

In football a man was asked to do a difficult and brutal job, and he either did it or got out.

I wanted to lie hour after hour on a couch, pouring out the dark, secret places of my heart – do this feeling that over my shoulder sat humanity and wisdom and generosity, a munificent heart – do this until that incredibly lovely day when the great man would say to me, his voice grave and dramatic with discovery: “This is you, Exley. Rise and go back into the world a whole man.

Whether or not I am a writer,” I wrote, “I have – and this is both my curse and my virtue – cultivated the instinct of one, an aversion for the herd, without, in my unhappy case, the ability to harness and articulate that aversion.

Listening now, it occured to me that I hadn’t come very far over the yars – no farther really than from one “gang bang” to another, save that I had learned, as B. had yet to learn, that tomorrow the pain would be even greater.

Whenever I think of the man I was in those days, cutting across the nat-cropped grass of the campus, burdened down by the weight of the books in which I sought the consolation of other men’s grief, and aburdened futher by the large weight of my own bitterness, the whole vision seems a nightmare. There were girls all about me, so near and yet so out of reach, a pastel nightmare of honey-blond, pink-lipped, golden-legged, lemon-sweatered girls.

If it comes at all, Emerson has cautioned that one’s call might not come for years. If it doesn’t, he remarks it as only a reflection of the universe’s faith in one’s abstinence, nothing to move the heart to fret.