Quotes from Jess Walter

But I think some people wait forever, and only at the end of their lives do they realize that their life has happened while they were waiting for it to start. Do you know what I mean, Pasquale?

fell in love with my country—its rivers, prairies, forests, mountains, cities and people. . . . It could be a paradise on earth if it belonged to the people, not to a small owning class. —Elizabeth Gurley Flynn

First, her father had a minor stroke, giving Claire a glimpse of his mortality and, by extension, her own. And then she had a vision of herself thirty years in the future: a spinster librarian in an apartment full of cats named after New Wave directors. (Godard, leave Rivette's chew toy alone—)

All we have is the story we tell. Everything we do, every decision we make, our strength, weakness, motivation, history, and character—what we believe—none of it is real; it's all part of the story we tell. But here's the thing: it's our goddamned story!

But I think some people wait forever, and only at the end of their lives do they realize that their life has happened while they were waiting for it to start. Do you know what I mean, Pasquale?" He did know what she meant! It was just how he felt—like someone sitting in the cinema waiting for the film to start.

You can't just say that, Pasquale. Those words have tremendous power. It's how people end up married.

Caroline was struck by just how close twenty-four feet really is, how little space really exists between us. Of course they were different, Lenny Ryan's shooting of the pawnbroker, her own shooting of the wife beater. But that meant there was a difference between what Lenny Ryan did and what Kevin Verloc did, that in the end we are separated not by distance, but degree. And in that truth was another; none of us knows, in the tumble of events, what she is capable of doing.

But the only thing I can think of is Time and patience.

How do you think it should end?" Young Pasquale considered the question. "Well, instead of going back to America during the war, he could go to Germany and try to kill Hitler." "Ah," Alvis Bender said. "Yes. That is exactly what happens, Pasquale. He gets drunk at a party and everyone warns him not to drive, but he makes a giant scene leaving the party and he jumps in his car and accidentally drives over Hitler.

I mean, who are you if you can't make it up? Especially people like you and me. Are we just supposed to stay the shitheads our parents and high schools sent out into the world, the ones our classmates assumed would do nothing with our lives?

Great fiction tells unknown truths. Great film goes further. Great film improves Truth. After all, what Truth ever made $40 million in its first weekend of wide release?

happy to no longer expect the dead perfection of museum art, but embrace the sweet lovely mess that is real life.

People can handle an unjust world; it's when the world becomes arbitrary and inexplicable that order breaks down.

On the bright side, I have figured out how to fix the American educational system. End it at sixth grade." "Brilliant. Then what?" "Lock them up in empty factories, give them all the Red Bull, condoms, and nachos they want, pipe in club music, and check back when they're twenty-five. Anyone still alive, we send to grad school." Wade pushed his glass forward. "How's that for a campaign platform?

And it's a life with no shortage of moments to recommend it, a life that picks up speed like a boulder rolling down a hill, easy and natural and comfortable, and yet beyond control somehow; it all happens so fast, you wake a young man and at lunch are middle-aged and by dinner you can imagine your death.

This is what happens when you live in dreams, he thought: you dream this and you dream that and you sleep right through your life. He needed coffee.

Great fiction tells unknown truths. Great film goes further. Great film improves Truth. After all, what Truth ever made $40 million in its first weekend of wide release? What Truth sold in forty foreign territories in six hours? Who's lining up to see a sequel to Truth?

Everyone sees the same movie, but every reader experiences a different book, because reading involves you in hours of active, creative work, the characters, their movements and thoughts re-created in your own mind, their struggles and triumphs connecting to your own until a book becomes like a piece of music you've played—and sometimes mastered—over a period of days, or weeks.

Another part of Bit's unifying urban theory is sprinklers, that you can gauge a neighborhood's wealth by the way people water. If every house has an automatic system, you're looking at a six-figure mean. If the majority lug hoses around, it's more lower-middle class. And if they don't bother with the lawns... well, that's the sort of shitburg where Bit and Julie always lived, except for that little place they rented in Wenatchee the summer Bit worked at the orchard.

For years. It was as if I was a character in a movie and the real action was about to start at any minute. But I think some people wait forever, and only at the end of their lives do they realize that their life has happened while they were waiting for it to start.

Stories are people. I'm a story, you're a story . . . Your father is a story. Our stories go in every direction, but sometimes, if we're lucky, our stories join into one, and for a while, we're less alone.

Two kinds of people always lie about their ages: actresses and Latin American pitchers.

Weren't movies his generation's faith anyway—its true religion? Wasn't the theater our temple, the one place we enter separately but emerge from two hours later together, with the same experience, same guided emotions, same moral? A million schools taught ten million curricula, a million churches featured ten thousand sects with a billion sermons—but the same movie showed in every mall in the country. And we all saw it!

It's quite a thing when the world is upside down to hear someone say it don't have to be—that a man could be paid enough to feed and house himself.