97 Quotes by Nelson Algren

I bet you think fellas are the ones to remember a girl -- don't you?"He shook his head hurriedly, that he'd always thought that."Fellas have all the fun 'n she just sees one right after another, so it seems like HE'D remember her, better 'n SHE'D remember him, only it works the other way around. I ain't forgot one single fella, all these years. But I bet there ain't TWO 'd know me from a big of bananas this minute.

Big-shot town, small-shot town, jet-propelled old-fashioned town, by old-world hands with new-world tools built into a place whose heartbeat carries farther than its shout, whose whispering in the night sounds less hollow than its roistering noontime laugh: they have builded a heavy-shouldered laughter here who went to work too young.

That's how it's always been: I was always in the clear so long as I was truly guilty. But the minute my motives were honest someone would finger me.

    "You ever been arrested before?"    "No sir. This is my first time."    "The first time this week, you mean."    "Oh, I been arrested in Michigan. I thought you meant in Illinois. I never been arrested in Illinois. I never did no wrong in Illinois."    "What good does that do you?"    "It don't. It's just that I love my state so much I go to Michigan to steal," he explained with an expression almost beatific.

In this neighborhood, with only forty-five cents, you're a bum. But Sobotnik, even with two dollars, he's still a bum.

    "I'm a guy like this," Gino explained to Jeanie; "I like anythin' against the odds. I don't like nothin' safe. I'm a guy like this too: I don't like gettin' caught. But mostly I'm a guy like this: I don't like gettin' laughed at."    He lived as he drove, as he gambled and as he loved: for keeps. Taking no man's laughter. And letting the small stakes go.

And the men come on again: the flashy and the penitent, the beaten ones and the wise guys, the hangdog heel thieves and the disdainful coneroos, walking, half crouched, through a downpour of light like men walking through rain. The frayed and the hesitant, the sleek and the bold, the odd fish and the callow youths, the good-humored bindle stiffs and the bitter veterans.

She was neither widow nor mother: she only yearned for the dignity of a woman who had once belonged, somewhere, to somebody. She had belonged to no one, for she had never wanted chick nor child. Her idea of home had been any side-alley entrance and a pint of tinted gin. All she had ever striven for was small change left lying by strangers on North Clark Street bars; and any man's bottle at all.

The city divided by the river is further divided by racial and lingual differences.