Quotes from Frederick Exley

In football a man was asked to do a difficult and brutal job, and he either did it or got out.

Unlike some men, I had never drunk for boldness or charm or wit; I had used alcohol for precisely what it was, a depressant to check the mental exhilaration produced by extended sobriety.

I certainly didn't want to fight with him. I did, however, want to shout, "Listen, you son of a bitch, life isn't all a goddam football game! You won't always get the girl! Life is rejection and pain and loss" -- all those things I so cherishly cuddled in my slef-pitying bosom. I didn't, of course, say any such thing

Whether or not I am a writer," I wrote, "I have—and this is both my curse and my virtue—cultivated the instinct of one, an aversion for the herd, without, in my unhappy case, the ability to harness and articulate that aversion.

That my lunacy had been recognized was chastening enough, but the judge's gratuitous "fatuous" carried with it intimations that I was in a blubbering, nose-picking state; an I had visions of arriving at my mother's door, garbed not in the "attractive," melancholic dementia of the poet but in the drooling, masturbatory, moony-eyed condition of the Mongoloid.

Listening now, it occured to me that I hadn't come very far over the yars -- no farther really than from one "gang bang" to another, save that I had learned, as B. had yet to learn, that tomorrow the pain would be even greater.

Whenever I think of the man I was in those days, cutting across the nat-cropped grass of the campus, burdened down by the weight of the books in which I sought the consolation of other men's grief, and aburdened futher by the large weight of my own bitterness, the whole vision seems a nightmare. There were girls all about me, so near and yet so out of reach, a pastel nightmare of honey-blond, pink-lipped, golden-legged, lemon-sweatered girls

Then he lost all coherence and began a hysterical giggle, compounded with a slight twitch and very pronounced emission of saliva from his mouth. When he finally fell silent, the stillness was of that horrified kind that follows a fart in a Methodist church.

If it comes at all, Emerson has cautioned that one's call might not come for years. If it doesn't, he remarks it as only a reflection of the universe's faith in one's abstinence, nothing to move the heart to fret

L'amour, bande de connards ! A quoi ça rime, sinon, de vivre ?

The world of the soap opera is the world of the Emancipated American Woman, a creature whose idleness is employed to no other purpose but creating mischief.

Like most Americans, though, I had led that numbingly chaste and uncommitted existence in which one forms neither sympathies nor antipathies of any enduring consequence.

If his inmost heart could have been laid open, there would have been discovered that dream of undying fame; which, dream as it is, is more powerful than a thousand realities. —NATHANIEL HAWTHORNE

It was Owen who over the years kept bringing me back to life's hard fact of famelessness. It was for this reason, as much as any other, that I had wanted to make the trip to Oneida to make my remembrances.

Unlike some men, I had never drunk for boldness or charm or wit; I had used alcohol for precisely what it was, a depressant to check the mental exhilaration produced by extended sobriety.