Quotes from Rick Moody

He had been lonely even in his wife's arms, lonely in crowds, lonely at meetings, lonely throwing tennis balls for his dog, lonely playing Operation with his kids. He had been lonely during commuter conversations, lonely during late-night heart-to-hearts with old fraternity brothers. His dad, living alone up in New Hampshire, made Hood lonely. The severe landscapes of November made him lonely.

There was probably some kind of anti-compulsive psychiatric medication liberally added to this trucked-in gross of cookies so that people like me, who could not stop eating the cookies once they were offered, would not continuously sneak down to the lobby in the soul-slaughtering hours between two and four a.m. to steal six at a time, finishing most of them before getting back to the room.

Reading was a brave spiritual journey for Elena Hood, and little piles of books were for her like the stacks of rubble—the Tibetan prayer walls—that marked the progress of pilgrims.

there are times when no matter what we do, despite our best efforts—it's not often but it can happen—very occasionally we are going to let you down.

we broke the complimentary cookie obtained in the lobby into small pieces and flung it over the fence of the Indonesian embassy, thinking that the scheming and warlike Indonesians were probably out at the time, and in the event that the Indonesians had not fed their local squirrels.

I have found on occasion that the Italians are suspicious of the benefits of air-conditioning. Or skeptical, or resistant, or oblivious to the benefits of air-conditioning.

Some people like a bidet, but Mrs. Salk said she does not want to shoot water up herself from a spigot that others have also used.

If one of them wanted to go to bed well before the other one wanted to go to bed, who could object, because the day would come when they could retreat back to rugged individualism, it was right there waiting to be re-employed, and so staggered shifts should not be interpreted as some kind of loss, some kind of giving up.

That cigar-chomping hemorrhoidal bigot who sits astride the riding mower on the two and a quarter acres beside you, he is smart enough to spend his IRA on this stock, so why can't you? Do you want him to have something you do not?

The idea of betrayal was in the air. The Summer of Love had migrated, in its drug-resistant strain, to the Connecticut suburbs about five years after its initial introduction.

It may be one of the most beautiful hotels in the entire world. Were you to discount hotels that are constructed primarily to house sheikhs—hotels that will never house you or me—you would have to conclude that this was a truly remarkable place.

One time I took the swing shift just to get away from her for a few weeks, I just filled in for this guy who had a back injury, and I came home when no one was awake, and then I'd just take some sleeping pills and drink a few beers. Everyone had a good laugh.

there would be no surprises, and the Jacuzzi was just a big bathtub with a few extra jets of water, loud enough that it could cover over just about any cries of despair. ???? (Posted 9/8/2012)

There should be a way to test this, there should be a sex-related metric with which you could measure sex in hotels, especially the illicit variety, but of what would that metric consist?

When you're starved for this kind of contact, a little goes a long way.

Literature precedes genre.

Have I mentioned that I expect death around every turn, that every blue sky has a safe sailing out of it, that every bus runs me over, that every low, mean syllable uttered in my direction seems to intimate the violence of murder, that every family seems like an opportunity for ruin and every marriage a ceremony into which calamity will fall and hearts will be broken and lives destroyed and people branded by the mortifications of love?

The past was so past it hurt.

People came to the desert because the stars were in the desert, and the stars had yet to be corrupted by man... The stars, it seemed, would crush man in a scenic, gravitational panorama before man would ever corrupt the stars.

Tangled in one another's arms and nine times out of ten the things you think about a person make it impossible to touch them.

If God had designed the orchestra, then the cello was His greatest accomplishment.

Fucking family. Feeble and forlorn and floundering and foolish and frustrating and functional and sad, sad. Fucking family. Fiend or foe.

This is a quote

It was monks who first taught the art of reading in silence. During the Dark Ages. Augustine, perhaps, was first. And silence was a tongue Elena understood. Silence was her idiom for support and caring. Silence was permissive and contemplative and nonconfrontational and there was melody to it. It was both earth and ether.