Anthony Trucks Quotes

Have a joke for me Tania," he says, "I could use a joke." "Hmm." She thinks, looks at him, looks to see where Anthony is. He's far in the back. "Okay, what about this." With a short cough she leans into Alexander and lowers her voice. "A man and his young girlfriend are driving in a car. The man has never seen his girlfriend naked. She thinks he is driving too slow, so they decide to play a game. For every five miles he goes above 50, she will take off a piece of her clothing. In no time at all, he is flying and she is naked. The man gets so excited that he loses control of the car. It veers off the road and hits a tree. She is unharmed but he is stuck in the car and can’t get out. “Go back on the road and get help,” he tells her. “But I’m naked,” she says. He rummages around and pulls off his shoe. “Here, just put this between your legs to cover yourself.” She does as she is told and runs out to the road. A truck driver, seeing a naked crying woman, stops. “Help me, Help me,” she sobs, “My boyfriend is stuck and I can’t get him out.” The Truck driver says, “Miss, if he’s that far in, I’m afraid he’s a goner.

Each day brought just another minute of the things they could not leave behind. Jane Barrington sitting on the train coming back to Leningrad from Moscow, holding on to her son, knowing she had failed him, crying for Alexander, wanting another drink, and Harold, in his prison cell, crying for Alexander, and Yuri Stepanov on his stomach in the mud in Finland, crying for Alexander, and Dasha in the truck, on the Ladoga ice, crying for Alexander, and Tatiana on her knees in the Finland marsh, screaming for Alexander, and Anthony, alone with his nightmares, crying for his father.

I often use the hypothetical out-of-control ice-cream truck. What would happen if you were walking across the street and were suddenly hit by a careening Mister Softee truck? As you lie there, in your last few moments of consciousness, what kind of final regrets flash through your mind? 'I should have had a last cigarette!' might be one. Or, 'I should have dropped acid with everybody else back in '74!' Maybe: 'I should have done that hostess after all!' Something along the lines of: 'I should have had more fun in my life! I should have relaxed a little more, enjoyed myself a little more . . .' That was never my problem. When they're yanking a fender out of my chest cavity, I will decidedly not be regretting missed opportunities for a good time. My regrets will be more along the lines of a sad list of people hurt, people let down, assets wasted and advantages squandered.

At the fairgrounds we saw them in the parking lot inhaling the effluvium of carnival, the smells of fried dough, caramel and cinnamon, the flap-flapping of tents, a carousel plinking out music-box songs, voluptuous sounds bouncing down tent ropes and along the trampled dust of the midway. Wind-curled handbills staple-gunned to telephone poles, the hum of gas-powered generators and the gyro truck, the lemonade truck, pretzels and popcorn, baked potatoes, the American flag, the rumblings of rides and the disconnected screams of riders -- all of it shimmered before them like a mirage, something not quite real.

The missing remained missing and the portraits couldn't change that. But when Akhmed slid the finished portrait across the desk and the family saw the shape of that beloved nose, the air would flee the room, replaced by the miracle of recognition as mother, father, sister, brother, aunt, and cousin found in that nose the son, brother, nephew, and cousin that had been, would have been, could have been, and they might race after the possibility like cartoon characters dashing off a cliff, held by the certainty of the road until they looked down -- and plummeted is the word used by the youngest brother who, at the age of sixteen, is tired of being the youngest and hopes his older brother will return for many reasons, not least so he will marry and have a child and the youngest brother will no longer be youngest; that youngest brother, the one who has nothing to say about the nose because he remembers his older brother's nose and doesn't need the nose to mean what his parents need it to mean, is the one who six months later would be disappeared in the back of a truck, as his older brother was, who would know the Landfill through his blindfold and gag by the rich scent of clay, as his older brother had known, whose fingers would be wound with the electrical wires that had welded to his older brother's bones, who would stand above a mass grave his brother had dug and would fall in it as his older brother had, though taking six more minutes and four more bullets to die, would be buried an arm's length of dirt above his brother and whose bones would find over time those of his older brother, and so, at that indeterminate point in the future, answer his mother's prayer that her boys find each other, wherever they go; that younger brother would have a smile on his face and the silliest thought in his skull a minute before the first bullet would break it, thinking of how that day six months earlier, when they all went to have his older brother's portrait made, he should have had his made, too, because now his parents would have to make another trip, and he hoped they would, hoped they would because even if he knew his older brother's nose, he hadn't been prepared to see it, and seeing that nose, there, on the page, the density of loss it engendered, the unbelievable ache of loving and not having surrounded him, strong enough to toss him, as his brother had, into the summer lake, but there was nothing but air, and he'd believed that plummet was as close as they would ever come again, and with the first gunshot one brother fell within arms' reach of the other, and with the fifth shot the blindfold dissolved and the light it blocked became forever, and on the kitchen wall of his parents' house his portrait hangs within arm's reach of his older brother's, and his mother spends whole afternoons staring at them, praying that they find each other, wherever they go.

Gulls pass, braying like donkeys, and in the distance the guns thud again, and the rattling of the truck fades, and Marie-Laure tries to concentrate on rereading a chapter earlier in the novel: make the raised dots form letters, the letters words, the words a world.

There was the sun, letting down great glowing masses of heat; there was life, active and snarling, moving about them like a fly swarm—the dark pants of smoke from the engine, a crisp "all aboard!" and a bell ringing. Confusedly Maury saw eyes in the milk train staring curiously up at him, heard Gloria and Anthony in quick controversy as to whether he should go to the city with her, then another clamor and she was gone and the three men, pale as ghosts, were standing alone upon the platform while a grimy coal-heaver went down the road on top of a motor truck, carolling hoarsely at the summer morning. CHAPTER

It was night. There was a drizzle, so Emily's black Japanese umbrella was up. The two were close beneath it, walking in long strides, beautiful, sinister-looking lovers, narrow squared shoulders in dark coats. A tall pickup truck sped by and a was a phlem struck the edge of the pavement near where they were walking. Emily raised a finger, cocked her thumb, and said, "Bang." "Got the left rear tire." said Anthony. "The truck rolled," she added, "and burst into flames." "He's still alive," said Anthony, "climbing out of the broken rear window, his hair and clothes ablaze, screaming for help." "Punky boys come and piss on him," said Emily. The discussion was very quiet, very earnest. "They put out the fire from his burning body," said Anthony, "but he dies later in the burn ward." "His family is relieved and happy," said Emily with stunning finality. Twenty-four hours later the spitting driver dies on a suburban highway near his home, his pickup spinning out of control on black ice, the vehicle exploding into flame. Anthony and Emily never know about it, never guess a connection to their curse, having never thought of him a second time.

Now it was dark. The airplane descended over Chicago, its galaxy of electric lights, the vast neighborhoods coming clearer as the plane glided toward the airport--streetlights, headlights, stacks of buildings, ice rinks, a truck turning at a stoplight, scraps of snow atop a warehouse and winking antennae on faraway hills, finally the long converging parallels of blue runway lights, and they were down.

Six blocks away at the telegraph office, Marie-Laure’s father presses his face to the window to watch two German motorcycles with sidecars roar through the Porte Saint-Vincent. The shutters of the town are drawn, but between slats, over sills, a thousand eyes peer out. Behind the motorcycles roll two trucks. In the rear glides a single black Mercedes. Sunlight flashes from the hood ornaments and chrome fittings as the little procession grinds to a stop on the ringed gravel drive in front of the soaring lichen-streaked walls of the Château de Saint-Malo.

Over Volkheimer’s shoulder, through the cracked rear window of the truck shell, Werner watches a red-haired child in a velvet cape float six feet above the road. She passes through trees and road signs, veers around curves; she is as inescapable as a moon. Werner curls beneath the bench in the back and does not move for hours, bundled in a blanket, refusing tea, tinned meat, while the floating child pursues him through the countryside. Dead girl in the sky, dead girl out the window, dead girl three inches away. Two wet eyes and that third eye of the bullet hole never blinking.

We drove through a few more neighborhoods after that, searching for the lost truck, listening to a CD of old Khmer songs, the same CD that had been stuck in the stereo since the Honda had belonged to mom. I barely understood the lyrics, aside from a few phrases in the choruses, but I knew the melodies, the voices, the weird mix of mournful, psychedelic tones. When I tried articulating my feelings about home, my mind inevitably returned to these songs, the way the incomprehensible intertwined with what made me feel so comfortable. I’d lived with misunderstanding for so long, I’d stopped even viewing it as bad. It was just there, embedded in everything I loved.

Everything has led to this: the death of his father; all those restless hours with Jutta listening to the crystal radio in the attic; Hans and Herribert wearing their red armbands under their shirts so Frau Elena would not see; four hundred dark, glittering nights at Schulpforta building transceivers for Dr. Hauptmann. The destruction of Frederick. Everything leading to this moment as Werner piles the haphazard Cossack equipment into the shell of the truck and sits with his back against the bench and watches the light from the burning cottage rise above the field. Bernd climbs in beside him, rifle in his lap, and neither bothers to close the back door when the Opel roars into gear.

and at the Napola school at Schulpforta, one hundred and nineteen twelve- and thirteen-year-olds wait in a queue behind a truck to be handed thirty-pound antitank land mines, boys who, in almost exactly one year, marooned amid the Russian advance, the entire school cut off like an island, will be given a box of the Reich’s last bitter chocolate and Wehrmacht helmets salvaged from dead soldiers, and then this final harvest of the nation’s youth will rush out with the chocolate melting in their guts and overlarge helmets bobbing on their shorn heads and sixty Panzerfaust rocket launchers in their hands in a last spasm of futility to defend a bridge that no longer requires defending, while T-34 tanks from the White Russian army come clicking and rumbling toward them to destroy them all, every last child

When presented with an open door in your job, drive a Mack truck through it.

A whole fresh tuna, a wicker basket of San Marzano tomatoes, a crate of anchovies, great handfuls of parsley... Dozens of new potatoes, still encrusted with the black volcanic earth of Campania, their flesh golden as egg yolks... A pale wheel of parmesan, big as a truck tire... A sack full of blooded watermelons... An armful of mint, its leaves so dark green they were almost black...

For four years she had been cobbling together odds and ends, just in order to put on the table something that resembled food. But now, thanks to Angelo and his black market contacts, she was cooking with real ingredients, and in the sort of quantities she had previously only dreamed of. A whole fresh tuna, a wicker basket of San Marzano tomatoes, a crate of anchovies, great handfuls of parsley... Dozens of new potatoes, still encrusted with the black volcanic earth of Campania, their flesh golden as egg yolks... A pale wheel of parmesan, big as a truck tire... A sack full of bloodred watermelons... An armful of mint, its leaves so dark green they were almost black... All afternoon and all evening she chopped and baked, and by the time darkness fell she had pulled together a feast that even she was proud of.

It's when I'm on the road that I begin to wonder, why I didn't get out of the way of the truck.

A politician is worse than the arsonist, for he lights the fire and then vows if elected he will supply more fire trucks.

Metaphorically speaking, there’s a difference between an arsonist and a politician; the arsonist willfully sets a fire and destroys property, the politician willfully sets a fire and campaigns on the promise, if elected, to provide us with fire trucks.