Quotes from G.M. Ford

I will never understand why anybody who's having so precious little fun here on earth is so damned intent on living forever.

Buddy eyed me closely. His eyes were filigreed with red. I watched as he went through one of those instantaneous mood swings that only drunks and menstruating women can manage.

Where's Nadine?" "She went out for a walk the other day and didn't come back." "Really." I tried to sound surprised. "No sweat," he said. "Pussy may well be the only true renewable resource, Leo. I've got another one lined up for when I get back." I had to admire a man with that kind of insight and planning.

His longterm aspirations were not a subject upon which he allowed himself to dwell. Not because they were in any way bad or bizarre, but because he had come to realize he didn't have any. Nothing specific anyway. He'd never pictured himself as anything in particular. Just a situation where he made enough money doing something... anything... enough to have whatever he wanted. A nice new Dodge pickup. A boat or maybe a little house someplace. The kind of things people wanted.

When I was younger, I used to drive like this all the time. Today I expected to be pulled over, pummeled, and summarily arrested at any moment. I felt old and stodgy.

They could hang around all day and nobody paid them any mind because society has trained itself not to see the poor and the destitute. That way, we don't have to think about how the richest society on earth allows so many of its citizens to live in the streets like stray dogs.

I've always been of the opinion that if people could just bring themselves to say "I don't know" when they don't know, we'd all live longer and have to listen to a whole lot less bullshit. But that's not how people are. People hate to say "I don't know." They'll speculate, gesticulate, and just plain make up shit to avoid saying the words out loud.

Every form of refuge has its price.

Wow . . . she's gotten older"—a realization that somehow never includes me, as if I am for some reason immune to aging. It isn't until I pass by a mirror and catch sight of my own composting carcass that I'm forced to fess up to reality. Hate when that happens.

These guys had names for every conceivable drinking situation. They liked to have a little eye-opener to get themselves going in the morning, a midmorning bracer before attempting anything serious, a few modest cocktails at lunch, followed by the obligatory afternoon pick-me-up, which segued neatly right into happy hour and ended with a little one just to help them sleep. For purely medicinal purposes, of course.

They'll be threatening to murder one another by Wednesday. As I understand it, it's all part of being sisters.

Some things in life you just have to erase. If you're going to go on with your existence, you have to drop them into a deep dark well somewhere in your soul, and trudge onward as if they never happened.

frigging badly would be gone in an instant. Two Bells owner Jeff Lee cleaned glasses and

I sat staring at the carpet for the longest time, trying to put everything I'd learned into some sort of meaningful order, but it was like reading late at night, where three minutes in you realize you've read the same paragraph six times and still don't have any idea what it's about.

I want to die peacefully in my sleep like my grandfather, not screaming like the passengers in his car.

thick, red-and-white-striped scarf wound around his neck like a Seussian python.

Don't lose sleep over it, Jed. Only the mediocre are at their best all the time.

Our memories are filled with the hundreds of people who have walked through our lives, touched us in some way, and then seemingly disappeared from the face of the earth. Time erodes our willingness to promise once again to keep in touch, and without willing it so, the Kleenex promises of youth give way to the carefully chosen holiday cards of

I've got to jump in the shower." "I'll Uber home," I said. "Do you realize you just made a noun into an intransitive verb?" I wiped my mouth. "Story of my life," I said.

suffers fools

Only the mediocre are at their best all the time.

a petri dish in the ocean of life.

I don't have a drinking problem," I said. "I have a stopping problem.

That was before the new puritans took over the city. Before political correctness became the rage and melted all of us into a single amorphous dung heap.