Patrick deWitt quotes:

I do not know what it was about that boy but just looking at him, even I wanted to clout him on the head. It was a head that invited violence.

Returning his pen to its holder, he told us, 'I will have him gutted with that scythe. I will hang him by his own intestines.' At this piece of dramatic exposition, I could not hep but roll my eyes. A length of intestines would not carry the weight of a child, much less a full grown man.

Luck was something you either earned or invented through strength of character. You had to come by it honestly; you could not trick or bluff your way into it.

It is true, I thought. I am living a life.

I lay in the dark thinking about the difficulties of family, how crazy and crooked the stories of a bloodline can be.

He only wished to fight and cultivate an anger toward me, thus alleviating his guilt, but I would not abet him in this.

...I am happy to welcome you to a town peopled in morons exclusively. Furthermore, I hope that your transformation to moron is not an unpleasant experience.

Come with me into the world and reclaim your independence. You stand to gain so much, and riches are the least of it.

He is not bad, I don't think. Perhaps he is simply too lazy to be good.

Here is another miserable mental image I will have to catalog and make room for.

Hurried business is bad business.

It is hard to find a friend,' I said. 'It is the hardest thing in this world,' he agreed.

Where is your mother, Charlie asked. Dead. I'm sorry to hear that Thank you. But she was always dead.

Why were you feeling low? Why does anyone? It creeps up on you from time to time.

...but I could not sleep without proper covering and spent the rest of the night rewriting lost arguments from my past, altering history so that I emerged victorious.

...things I had come to find humor in would make your honest man swoon.

All you will get from me is death.

Do you know how much a hundred dollars is?' he asked. I said that I did not and he answered, 'It is a hundred dollars.

I had never been with a woman for longer than a night, and they had always been whores. And while throughout each of these speedy encounters I tried to maintain a friendliness with the women, I knew in my heart it was false, and afterward always felt remote and caved in. I had in the last year or so given up whores entirely, thinking it best to go without rather than pantomime human closeness.

I saw my bulky person in the windows of the passing storefronts and wondered, when will that man there find himself to be loved?

I thought, When a man is properly drunk it is as though he is an a room by himself--there is a physical, impenetrable separation between him and his fellows.

I will admit he is unusual, but that is perhaps the closest I could come to complimenting him.

I will never be a leader of men, and neither do I want to be one, and neither do I want to be led. I thought: I want to lead only myself.

Mayfield said, "You asked what I was thinking. Well, I will tell you. I was thinking that a man like myself, after suffering such a blow as you men have struck on this day, has two distinct paths he might travel in his life. He might walk out into the world with a wounded heart, intent on sharing his mad hatred with every person he passes; or, he might start out anew with an empty heart, and he should take care to fill it up with only proud things from then on, so as to nourish his desolate mind-set and cultivate something positive or new.

Most people are chained to their own fear and stupidity and haven't the sense to level a cold eye at just what is wrong with their lives. Most people will continue on, dissatisfied but never attempting to understand why, or how they might change things for the better, and they die with nothing in their hearts but dirt and old, thin blood - weak blood, diluted - and their memories aren't worth a goddamned thing.

Our blood is the same, we just use it differently.

The creak of bed springs suffering under the weight of a restless man is as lonely a sound as I know.

This perhaps was what lay at the root of the hysteria surrounding what came to be known as the Gold Rush: Men desiring a feeling of fortune; the unlucky masses hoping to skin or borrow the luck of others, or the luck of a destination. A seductive notion, and one I thought to be wary of. To me, luck was something you either earned or invented through strength of character. You had to come by it honestly; you could not trick or bluff your way into it.

We rode along in silence, thinking our private thoughts. Charlie and I had an unspoken agreement not to throw ourselves into speedy travel just after a meal. There were many hardships to our type of life and we took these small comforts as they came; I found they added up to something decent enough to carry on

Work will drive you crazy if you let it.

You put a wage behind something, it gives the act a sort of respectability.

Your laughter is like cool water to me," I said. I felt my heart sob at these strange words, and it would not have been hard to summon tears: Strange. " "You are so serious all of a sudden," she told me. "I am not any one thing," I said. (137)

Your skin is prickly from fatigue and pain and there is a hissing in your ears. Time passes and the pills are taking hold like a glowing white planet coming into view. A reverse eclipse. And you watch with your eyes closed. The white planet is half exposed, it grips your heart in its light and seems to be pulling you forward and now you feel that you are falling. You are awake but dreaming. "The earth is not beautiful but the universe is," you say.

We can all of us be hurt, and no one is exclusively safe from worry and sadness.