Quotes from Laurence Shames

Success and failure. We think of them as opposites, but they're really not. They're companions - the hero and the sidekick.

Why are we inspired by another person's courage? Maybe because it gives us the sweet and genuine surprise of discovering some trace, at least, of the same courage in ourselves.

Consumption kept the workers working, which kept the paychecks coming, which kept the people spending, which kept the investors investing, which meant there was more to consume. The system, properly understood, was independent of values and needed no philosophy to prop it up. It was a perfect circle, complete in itself - and empty in the middle.

One of the things Key West teaches is that disappointment and contentment can go together more easily than you would probably imagine.

There's a look that two people share when it is inevitable that they're becoming lovers; that they've become lovers, in spirit if not yet in deed. The look is the bond that sex confirms.

You have reached the home and workplace of Roberto Natchez. I do not often take calls. I make no promise to return them. I have much to do. You may leave a message if you wish.

When a marriage works, it is in no small part because a woman and a man have come to recognize in precise measure when enough has been said.

Art happens when a person of talent is seized with nervous energy and discovers that he or she has nothing to do except create.

Hot April sunshine poured in through the open top of the old Caddy, shafts of it splattering into rainbows as they sliced through the facets of the spiderweb windshield.

His father was not a man to make a habit of offering his upturned throat.

She flushed a becoming pink during the ceremony; her green eyes moistened and shimmered like the calm and prosperous ocean.

He would be the kind of friend he wished he had, and so perhaps become worthy of having such a friend himself.

took a moment to look around

Sleeping and waking—for him the states grew ever less distinct. Sleep gained in truth as waking lost the arrogance of certainty. Dreams, three-D and portentous, sported a logic no less satisfactory than that of what, by mere consensus, was called the real. Categories dissolved; things floated free of their names, and a kind of geriatric Buddhism became ever more unquestioned and serene.

An old man's errors mattered both more and less than a young man's. More because there was less time to undo them; less because there was less time to endure their consequences. You coulda done plenty, Joey. I never gave you a chance.

It's none of your business what I'm aware of.

everybody but me seemed so cool and so blasé about the various and sundry crimes they had committed.

Key West—a town of people passing through, looking around, waiting, hoping for something special to happen, then not having a clue what was going on when it did.

a lavishly gifted underachiever who is gaining renown less for the canvases he paints than for those we hope he'll paint.

but what was devotion if not the habit and the piling up of small considerations?

But coming halfway clean was a time- honored way of continuing to lie.

Well, anyway," Joey went on blithely, "few years ago this guy calls me up. 'Joey,' he says, 'I got big problems. The vacation market is in the shits, I can't pay my mortgage. What should I do?' I say, 'How about you put some fucking pants on and get a job?' He says, 'I have no pants.' I say, 'I'll buy you some.' 'No,' he says. 'Fuck pants.

and wondered how much power and how much wisdom it would take to do right by more than one person at a time. A

You listened so you would learn; you thought so that your answer would not return to humiliate or harm you, because, in Paulie's world, once something was said it could not be called back or explained away.