Quotes from Louis Bayard

I'm a man of a certain age - old enough to have been every kind of fool- and I find to my surprise that the only counsel I have to pass on is this: Never let your name be found in a dead man's trousers.

I've often thought a blind man could find his way through London simply by gauging the changes in innuendo: mild through Trafalgar Square, less veiled towards the river.

Well, as to that, all I'll say is, you can't take out a fellow's heart before he's ready to give it up.

There are times, I declared, when I believe the dead haunt us because we love them too little.

You are asking us to lie, Colonel? I am asking you to omit. Surely, amidst the...the infinite gradations of human venality, that particular sin ranks low. The old man kneaded the folds of his throat. What happened out there belongs out there. The jungle has it; let the jungle keep it...

For reasons I have yet to define, Signor Arpelli stood out from his colleagues. The curled brim of his hat, perhaps. A certain mingling of gravity and levity- I thought the masks of Janus had merged in his eyes.

I'm a solitary sort, I get chaffed by too many elbows.

He became, in that instant, pure topography: his belly a highland, tapering down to a head-hamlet, with two hard-blinking eye-ponds. Four servants rushed to his aid. He waved them off with a smile. Made

Men don't always know what they need. That's why God made women.

Here was the thing about traveling down an uncharted river: You could only say how long you'd been traveling; you could never say how long it would be.

My next thought was for Lord Suckling's charming song: 'I prithee send me back my heart / Since I cannot have thine.

I look back on the poor benighted creature I was before I met her, and I see a dead man. Marching in all the right directions, answering when spoken to, fulfilling all his appointed rounds, but dead all the same. And now this woman has awakened me, and I am alive at last, and at what cost! What pain it is to be among the living!

was nine when she passed. The last thing she told us was Be good to one another.

I'm the one who feeds the lions their raw meat.

For what purpose?" "So they don't devour the other speakers.

The first Snow, Landor! Rare bliss it was to awaken and to find every tree and rock overrun with snow; to find the snowflakes still spilling like hoarded coins from the sky's cloud-purses.

friend of mine says you can't swing a dead cat without hitting one.

hope you will allow me to speak as plainly as I can." This was the difference, he thought, between the South and the North. A Southern woman would never ask permission.

believe, it is the height of love to—to release a loved one.

Many a woman has been won without ever being wooed.

I was given a room overlooking Constitution Island. The shutters kept out nearly all the starlight and moonlight—sleeping was a dive into a pit, and the sound of reveille seemed to come from a distant star. I lay there, watching the red light steal through the bottom of the shutters. The darkness felt delicious. I wondered if maybe I'd missed my true career.

It won't do, gentlemen. I'm a solitary sort, I get chaffed by too many elbows.

You don't quit loving somebody just on account of they're dead.

Messieurs," interjects the Baroness. "If you insist on communicating sotto voce, we might as well adjourn to my lodgings." A light pinking in her cheek as she ponders the implications. "In my younger days, I should have balked at bringing two gentlemen home. I'm now at the age when it might ectually enhance my reputation.