Quotes from Dale Peck

Don't come to New York until you've finished a book. It's too expensive. You'll never write anything. You'll spend all your time working to pay the rent.

Art is only great if it's uncodifiable. If art isn't scaring you, if it's not making you upset, then I don't think it's actually doing anything.

Sometimes when we think we're protecting ourselves, we're really hurting ourselves. And sometimes the people around us too.

People who shop at Barnes and Noble voted Ulysses the best novel of the last century, and who's to tell them different? There was a point when I would have liked to, but apparently that's just because I'm a bitch.

Your past comes with you no matter where you go.

I have a secret. And everyone knows it but me.

There's an alchemy that happens during sex that causes 1 + 1 to add up to much more than 2, even as those halves meld in an almost magical way to form a single unit that's more complete than either of them alone.

Drift House: Susan's response to Queen Octavia's sarcasm in regards to fading memories..."But we pass our memories on," she insisted. "I mean, from one generation to the next. Parents teach their children. They write things down, tell them stories--

Children," Mrs. Oakenfeld sighed. "I do not want you to be good to avoid being punished. I do not want you to be good so that you can receive rewards. I want you to be good," she stressed, "because it is the right thing to do. You are very formidable adversaries, but don't you see that when you work against eachother, you just cancel eachother out?

Life's cheap out here, Daniel. With a little budgeting I can get by till you go off to college." "And then?" My dad reached for whatever he was drinking that day. "There don't always have to be a then." He poured, drank, swallowed, grimaced. Left his hand on the bottleneck. "Hell, there ain't really a now, so why should there be a then?

You are -" she stopped fanning long enough to push the glasses up her nose - "Sprout Bradford?" I thought it was a little pretentious to say "You are Sprout Bradford?" instead of "Are you Sprout Bradford?" so I said, "I are Sprout Bradford!" in my best half-hick, half-retard voice.

I hate it when people repeat the last thing that's been said to them because they're too afraid to ask what the other person meant by it. "You want to remember this moment," I said finally, because when it comes right down to it, I'm a coward.

she thought that sometimes you walk right into language as though it's a chair out of place in a dark room: a word, an expression you live with all your life can become suddenly, completely unfamiliar. That night Beatrice stumbled over death, but it was dark, and she was tired, and she believed that she had stumbled across love.

A physicist once told me that one view of our universe is that its stability is an accident, that thousands upon thousands of relationships are unstable and that chance alone holds ours together.

Because freedom, it turned out, wasn't like a new shoe: you didn't need to break it in. It felt comfortable the first time you tried it on. It wasn't the present that pinched, it was the past.