25 Quotes by Jack Finney

He's got to have the ability, and it seems to be fairly rare, to see things as they are and at the same time as they might have been. What we mean is the eye of an artist.

Would you have references?""I'm awfully sorry but I haven't. I just arrived in New York, and don't know a soul. Except you." I smiled but she didn't smile back. She stood hesitating, and I said, "It's true that I'm an escaped convict, an active counterfeiter, and occasional murderer. And I howl during the full of the moon. But I'm neat.

It was an ordinary day, a Friday, twenty minutes til lunchtime, five hours til quitting time and the weekend, ten months til vacation, thirty-seven years til retirement. Then the phone rang.

It may be that the strongest instinct of the human race, stronger than sex or hunger, is curiosity: the absolute need to know. It can and often does motivate a lifetime, it kills more than cats, and the prospect of satisfying it can be the most exciting of emotions.

I went up a straight crooked lane and, I said 'No thanks, yes if yer please.

When you've heard one bagpipe tune, you've heard them both.

And that, my friend, is how the world ends. On the edge of a precipice, with one foot over the edge, it stops, turns and goes back, leaving an empty earth of birds and insects, wind, rain and rusting weapons.

Have you ever given someone a book you enjoyed enormously, with a feeling of envy because they were about to read it for the first time, an experience you could never have again?

So all in all there wasn't anything really wrong with my life. Except that, like most everyone else's I knew about, it had a big gaping hole in it, an enormous emptiness, and I didn't know how to fill it or even know what belonged there.