Quotes from Edwin O'Connor

I left out certain details, but while these were important to me, they would have been to no one else: they were those moments, those parts of life, which are so purely personal and private that you can no more share them than you can share your heart or brain: in all of us there is that small and unsurrenderable core that...well, that in the end determines everything.

I could not believe in the joyous morning bound. It was disbelief well-founded: thirty-five years between then and now, and while I rise punctually I do so grudgingly; each morning brings its own renewal of the battle....

In this city today there are twenty men, all about your age, who have no family ties with me, who have never given me a cent, who had no special reason and certainly no obligation to help me or even to like me. And yet from every one of them I've gotten more kindness, advice, assistance, and just plain human consideration than I've ever gotten from you - and to every one of them I feel closer, infinitely closer, than I do to you. Now this is a fact, Dad: a simple fact.

I'm not just an elected official of the city; I'm a tribal chieftain as well.

"God be good to the man," she said. "He was mean as a panther, but good luck to him."