Quotes from Pete Hamill

There he is, three days after his fifth birthday, standing barefoot upon wet summer grass. He is staring at the house where he lives: the great good Irish place of whitewashed walls, long and low, with a dark slate roof glistening in the morning drizzle. Standing there, he knows it will turn pale blue when the sun appears to work its magic.

Normalcy was the byword, even when it was a lie.

Everywhere, men and women changed their names and embraced strange gods in order to live.

I will live my life from now on, I will not perform it.

Until that night, the well-fed, respectable whites had convinced themselves that slaves loved being slaves.

You lived in the present, but that present always contained a past, some image of a ruined paradise.

and one of their lessons was that the essence of the work was the doing of it.

In a city where human beings struggle for the privilege of sleeping over subway grates

see the world as a skeptic, not a cynic, while allowing for the wan possibility of human decency.

Quakers quaking. Congregationalists congregating, Baptists baptizing, Dutch Reformers reforming; Episcopalians pissing on the lot. All asked for money to support the war against evil.

The cause of death was always life. Across many years now, he had comforted people he knew would soon die. He hoped his consoling whispers would do them no harm. He hoped too that he could reduce their immediate pain. But he could not carry them around in his head like luggage. He had to examine with all the intensity he could muster, do what he could, avoid harm, and then forget them.

How strange it seems, with so much gone Of life and love, to still live on.

There are 10,000 books in my library, and it will keep growing until I die. This has exasperated my daughters, amused my friends and baffled my accountant. If I had not picked up this habit in the library long ago, I would have more money in the bank today; I would not be richer.

I don't ask for the meaning of the song of a bird or the rising of the sun on a misty morning. There they are, and they are beautiful.

The only way to fight nostalgia is to listen to somebody else's nostalgia

I don't know what that means. To truly live." "To find work that you love, and work harder than other men. To learn the languages of the earth, and love the sounds of the words and the things they describe. To love food and music and drink. Fully love them. To love weather, and storms, and the smell of rain. To love heat. To love cold. To love sleep and dreams. To love the newness of each day.

He tried to imagine the sound of the color red.

Just like that. Gone forever. They will not grow old together. They will never live on a beach by the sea, their hair turned white, dancing in a living room to Billie Holiday or Nat Cole. They will not enter a New York club at midnight and show the poor hip-hop fools how to dance. They will not chuckle together over the endless folly of the world, its vanities and stupid ambitions. They will not hug each other in any chilly New York dawn. Oh, Mary Lou. My baby. My love.

Human beings want to know too much abut each other, and that's why there are so many lies.

To love women. To pleasure them, to make them laugh. To be foolish for them. To protect them. To respect them. To listen to them. They are life-givers. To live is to love them.

Besides, skin color was skin color, right? It was just the color of your goddamned skin. There was nothing anybody could do about that. You were born with it. Like some people were born with big feet or blue eyes. You didn't make the choice. Your parents did. Or God did.

I would understand later that baseball was what truly made him an American: the sports pages were more crucial documents than the Constitution.

The world was a grand confusion. Finally, when I was drunk, and my mind couldn't do what I wanted it to do, I went home. I would lie alone In the dark, feeling that I was a character in a story that had lost its plot." Sann "Don't ever use the word tragedy again. You tell what happened, and let the reader say it's a tragedy. If you're crying, the reader won't.

I wanted to sit there forever, drinking in bitter satisfaction, using someone else as a license. In the years that followed, I did a lot of that.