Quotes from Russell Hoban

He grew morose, and felt himself half overcome by funk

Three-hundred-pound turtles navigate the ocean and come ashore to be slaughtered for the five pounds of cartilage that gets sold to the soup-makers.

When I was a child grown-ups often told me to smile, which I found presumptuous of them. People still tell me that sometimes, mostly idiots at parties.

They won't stop killing the whales. They make dog- and cat-food out of them, face creams, lipstick. They kill the whales to feed the dogs so the dogs can shit on the pavement and the people can walk in it.

You hear diffrent things in all them way back storys but it dont make no diffrents, Mostly they aint strait storys any how. What they are is diffrent ways of telling what happent.

I am only the waves and particles of such as I was but I have a covenant with the Lord, the terms of it are simple: everything is required of me, for ever.

Yes thats what I done you sorry sods I over the fents and off with the dogs...

Navigare necesse est. Vivere non est necesse.' I've

The grown-up is only a thin coat of chocolate over the hard nut of the child. Whatever you were as a kid, you still are when the chocolate gets licked off or scraped off.

The race of man haunted by the thought of what it used to be, ashamed of what they are, afraid of what they were.

All of this comes out of what is now an empty space. There are depths to this. It's a lot to think about. From an empty space the future. If there's no empty space where can one put the future? It all figures if you take the time to think it out.

That trains mostly stay on rails, that the streets are mostly peaceful, that the square continues green and quiet below my window is more than I have any right to expect, and it happens every day.

sharna pax and hed on a poal when the ardship of Cambry come out of his hoal

If the way is diffrent the end is diffrent. Becaws the end aint nothing only part of the way its jus that part of the way where you come to a stop. The end cud be any part of the way its in every step of the way thats why you bes go ballsy.

I have forgotten more of my life than I remember, and with my forgetting I have lost my being.

The silence sat down with them like an invisible creature with its finger to its lips.

How was I to be a scientist, father Lion?' Science is knowing. What could I have known? Others always did the knowing, knew what was in me, what should come out of me, what was best for me. I didn't know who I was, what I wanted. I know less now, and I am afraid.

There were times when it seemed the different parts of him where not all under the same management.

People who for years had not looked for things in booked found new appetites for knowledge when they spoke to him. To someone who came in asking for the latest novel he might sell not only the novel but a biological treatise on the life of ants, an ecological study of ancient man, a philosophical work, and a history of small sailing-craft.

Dont you know if you keap getting a head of your self youwl jus only fall over your self when you get to where you are going?

It may happen to me at any time that everything will be just what it is, with no stories in anything.

Jachin-Boaz was at the age called middle life, but he did not believe that he had as many years ahead of him as he had behind him.

I stil aint qwite said how it wer. Not like a diffrent country. It wer mor like I wer behynt the back clof in a show. Thats how it wer. Thru the clof I cud see the other figgers moving I cud see the peopl watching only no 1 cud see me. If I wer a figger in a show what hand wer moving me then? I cudnt be bothert to think on that right then. Theres all ways some thingwl be moving you if it aint 1 thing its a nother you cant help that.

Seeds blow in the wind and what is earf but a deadness with life growing out of it?