31 Quotes by Peter Orner

Yeah, I want to retreat from the world and ponder in solitude. At the same time I wouldn’t mind at least a couple of people pondering my whereabouts.

Is this, Miriam wonders, what they call the march of history? And even if she doesn't fully understand, it doesn't mean she can't appreciate the need, the periodic need for some people to resort to gasoline, rags, and matches. Doesn't it always come to this? Isn't history as much about tearing things down as it is about building things up?

I only want to repeat what you already know. There is no limit to how far a person can fall in America.

Chicago does not go to the world, the world comes to Chicago! Who needs New York? Who has taller buildings than our tall buildings? Who's got a busier airport than our airport? You want Picasso? We got Picasso, big Picasso. Nobody can make heads or tails of it. It's a lion? No, a seahorse. Looks to me like a radiator with wings. Who gives a damn, people, a Picasso's a Picasso.

...To ensure that we don't merely exist in the dead present? ... That the oblivion of the now as opposed to the ecstasy of looking back--but wait, wait, if the present is the past, you fool, dissolving this very moment--then it is incumbent upon us now, now, to create the past--so obvious! so rudimentary!--it's the uncreated past that is dead [Walt Kaplan/August, Bedroom]

if you tried to take into account all the heartbreak behind the lighted windows of a single city on a single night, your head would explode clean off your neck." [Ineffectual Tribute to Len]

Leo wondered what unknown sin they must have committed in some previous life to deserve this. The answer came the same way their feet later shocked to life in the warming hut after being so numb for hours- you think you'll never feel your toes again, and then all of a sudden life, damaged, stiffened, clammy, but life, dog-eat-dog life! We have not done a single thing to deserve this.

For me what reverberates, what I often relive and relive, are those times that were cut short, times so fleeting they hardly even happened. [Maggie Brown]

You could stand there two hours; you could stand there five minutes. The Pacific didn't give a hoot about time. It would eat a year for breakfast. Is that why they'd always been so drawn to it? Is that why, still, they came and stood at the edge, day after day? Its blessed indifference? [Pacific]