40 Quotes by Jonathan Lee

New York didn't set out to charm you. It was like God that way. You had to bring a lot of the enthusiasm yourself.

He...wondered if his own occasional doubts about the existence of God might in some way be mutual. Did anyone in the heavens really believe in him, Andrew Green, this awkward boy below, his spirit, his potential for good? His own question frightened him into muteness, the kind of silence the living rarely know, the moon hanging sullied by smoke in the sky, filthy with the expulsions of men.

At the age of eighty-three he had the self-awareness necessary to be patient with other people, but not always the facility to disguise the effort.

Love. This was the way not to fall into forgetting. Love, and a good publicist.

It was funny how your whole past came into play as you worked toward a future. The concert of barely connected moments that make up any life. No one experience can be unlinked from the next. There were times when his [Andrew Haswell Green's] own past lives were the only ghosts he needed to visit for advice.

Praise and censure went down exactly the same drain, though he [Andrew Haswell Green] admittedly preferred the friendly trickle of the former.

A man dies at twenty and it is a great shame. He dies at thirty or forty and he has been taken from us too soon. But if one reaches the age of eighty-three, all the shock eventually begins to flow the other way, even in a murder case. The chief question becomes: How on earth did he survive so long?

Mother died when he was twelve. He did not want sympathy, he only wanted her back.

I was the outsider in Fernhall House, but they were all outsiders really. Outside society. Outside time. You hear people say that those in asylums and care facilities are out of their minds. But in truth their minds are often the one thing they are not out of. Their whole being is sheltering behind walls of muscle and bone. Everything they are - and are not - exists within their sacrosanct headspace.