Billy Summers Quotes

All of those faeries and duels and mad queens and so on, and no one quoted old Billy Shakespeare. Not even once.

He thinks writing is also a kind of war, one you fight with yourself. The story is what you carry and every time you add to it, it gets heavier.

Marginalia Sometimes the notes are ferocious, skirmishes against the author raging along the borders of every page in tiny black script. If I could just get my hands on you, Kierkegaard, or Conor Cruise O'Brien, they seem to say, I would bolt the door and beat some logic into your head. Other comments are more offhand, dismissive - Nonsense." "Please!" "HA!!" - that kind of thing. I remember once looking up from my reading, my thumb as a bookmark, trying to imagine what the person must look like who wrote "Don't be a ninny" alongside a paragraph in The Life of Emily Dickinson. Students are more modest needing to leave only their splayed footprints along the shore of the page. One scrawls "Metaphor" next to a stanza of Eliot's. Another notes the presence of "Irony" fifty times outside the paragraphs of A Modest Proposal. Or they are fans who cheer from the empty bleachers, Hands cupped around their mouths. Absolutely," they shout to Duns Scotus and James Baldwin. Yes." "Bull's-eye." "My man!" Check marks, asterisks, and exclamation points rain down along the sidelines. And if you have managed to graduate from college without ever having written "Man vs. Nature" in a margin, perhaps now is the time to take one step forward. We have all seized the white perimeter as our own and reached for a pen if only to show we did not just laze in an armchair turning pages; we pressed a thought into the wayside, planted an impression along the verge. Even Irish monks in their cold scriptoria jotted along the borders of the Gospels brief asides about the pains of copying, a bird singing near their window, or the sunlight that illuminated their page- anonymous men catching a ride into the future on a vessel more lasting than themselves. And you have not read Joshua Reynolds, they say, until you have read him enwreathed with Blake's furious scribbling. Yet the one I think of most often, the one that dangles from me like a locket, was written in the copy of Catcher in the Rye I borrowed from the local library one slow, hot summer. I was just beginning high school then, reading books on a davenport in my parents' living room, and I cannot tell you how vastly my loneliness was deepened, how poignant and amplified the world before me seemed, when I found on one page A few greasy looking smears and next to them, written in soft pencil- by a beautiful girl, I could tell, whom I would never meet- Pardon the egg salad stains, but I'm in love.

Billy squinted at me. "Why are you letting them go?" "Because they're real." "How do you know?" "The one I was holding crapped on my hand.

It’s just that if there’s a God, he’s doing a piss poor job.

By then I was a teenager, and teenagers say anything to hurt when they are hurting.

When I was writing, I forgot to be sad. I forgot to worry about the future. I forgot where I was. I didn’t know that could happen. I

Try to write your own story. Consider writing about yourself, or rewriting something in your life you wished had gone differently. Then, be brave and share with someone what you’ve written. How did this process feel for you?

Writing is good. He’s always wanted to do it, and now he is. That’s good. Only who knew it hurt so much?

I guess most jokes have some truth in them and that's what makes them funny.

He waits. The time passes. It always does.

Feelings are like breathing, they come in and go out.

there’s no sense worrying about what you can’t control. Doing that is a good way to go crazy.

Bad people need to pay a price. And the price should be high.

God doesn’t have a plan, He throws pickup sticks.

Did you know that could happen? Did you know you could sit in front of the screen or a pad of paper and change the world? It doesn't last, the world always comes back, but before it does, it's awesome. It's everything, because you can have things the way you want. And I want you to still be alive. In the story you are, and always will be.

There aren’t just 2 kinds of people, good and bad, like I thought when I was a kid who got most of his ideas on how people act from TV. There are 3. The third type of people go along to get along, like Deputy F.W.S. Malkin told me to do. Those are the most people in the world and I think they are gray people. They will not hurt you (at least on purpose) but they won’t help you much, either. They will say do what you want and God help you.

Did you know that you could sit in front of a screen or a pad of paper and change the world? It doesn’t last, the world always comes back, but before it does, it’s awesome. It’s everything.

I love the arrival of a new season — each one bringing with it its own emotion: spring is full of hope; summer is freedom; autumn is a colourful release, and winter brings an enchanting peace. It's hard to pick which one I enjoy the most — each time the new one arrives, I remember its beauty and forget the previous one whose qualities have started to dim.

What was it about Eric? He was handsome and talented, yeah. But lots of guys were. She had adored Billy Klein back in Alabama the summer before, and she had even felt attracted to him, but it wasn't like this. What made you feel that stomach-churning agony for one person and not another? If Bridget were God, she would have made it against the law for you to feel that way about someone without them having to feel it for you right back.

All over the world there are half-finished books - memoirs, poetry novels, surefire plans for getting thin or getting rich - in desk drawers, because the work got too heavy for the people trying to carry it and they put it down

What I know is men like him are above justice in most cases. Except the kind we gave him.

Probably on one of those NPR shows where everyone sounds smart and full of Prozac

Wow. That's sort of pretty. In a Jaws kind of way.

Woof,” said Billy the Werewolf.

And way across, on the other side, this is crazy, but I thought I saw that hotel you talked about. Then I blinked my eyes—the wind was so strong they were tearing up—and when I looked again, it was gone.” Bucky doesn’t smile. “You’re not the only person who’s seen that. I’m not a superstitious man, but I wouldn’t go anywhere near where the Overlook Hotel used to stand. Bad stuff happened there.

He can’t change his past but he means to change his future. He also intends to have his payday. He earned it.

you make your plan and hope the stuff you don’t foresee won’t show up to bite you in the ass.

Billy likes people, and he likes to keep them at arms’ length. It sounds like a contradiction, but it’s not.

How do you know you're an idiot? Because if everyone is looking at you like they are now, you're an idiot.

wouldn’t go anywhere near where the Overlook Hotel used to stand. Bad stuff happened there.

When I was writing, I forgot to be sad. I forgot to worry about the future. I forgot where I was. I didn't know that could happen.

Billy doesn't care if it rains, sleets, snows, or shits bananas.

Beyond the table, there is an altar, with candles lit for Billie Holiday and Willa Carter and Hypatia and Patsy Cline. Next to it, an old podium that once held a Bible, on which we have repurposed an old chemistry handbook as the Book of Lilith. In its pages is our own liturgical calendar: Saint Clementine and All Wayfarers; Saints Lorena Hickok and Eleanor Roosevelt, observed in the summer with blueberries to symbolize the sapphire ring; the Vigil of Saint Juliette, complete with mints and dark chocolate; Feast of the Poets, during which Mary Oliver is recited over beds of lettuce, Kay Ryan over a dish of vinegar and oil, Audre Lorde over cucumbers, Elizabeth Bishop over some carrots; The Exaltation of Patricia Highsmith, celebrated with escargots boiling in butter and garlic and cliffhangers recited by an autumn fire; the Ascension of Frida Khalo with self-portraits and costumes; the Presentation of Shirley Jackson, a winter holiday started at dawn and ended at dusk with a gambling game played with lost milk teeth and stones. Some of them with their own books; the major and minor arcana of our little religion.

He has no problem with bad people paying to have other bad people killed. He basically sees himself as a garbageman with a gun.

According to William Wordsworth, the best writing is about strong emotion recalled in tranquility. Billy has lost his tranquility.

By the summer I turned nine Daddy had given up about having a boy. He tried making me do.

Now he understands—he never did before, never even considered it—that any writer who goes public with his work is courting danger. It’s part of the allure. Look at me. I’m showing you what I am.

Summer was meeting everyone by throwing the rich carpet of blue periwinkles over the little hill under one of the spreading apricot trees, and by sparking off the lights of red and lilac decorative peas which crawled on the lattice boarding the vegetable garden

So, what's the score, Billy asked. Well-intentioned but dangerously insane bad guys are ahead, coming down the stretch, I said. The faerie courts are duking it out up there, and it's probably going to be very hairy. The Summer Lady is our baddie, and the Winter Knight is her bitch. She has a magic hanky. She's going to use it to change a statue into a girl and kill her on a big Flinstone's table at midnight.

I'll Be Seeing You" I'll be seeing you In all the old familiar places That this heart of mine embraces All day and through In that small cafe The park across the way The children's carousel The chestnut trees, the wishing well I'll be seeing you In every lovely summer's day In everything that's light and gay I'll always think of you that way I'll find you in the morning sun And when the night is new I'll be looking at the moon But I'll be seeing you I'll be seeing you In every lovely summer's day In everything that's light and gay I'll always think of you that way I'll find you in the morning sun And when the night is new I'll be looking at the moon But I'll be seeing you

...Billy doubts that any woman ever heals completely after being raped. It leaves a scar and he guesses that on some days the scar aches. He guesses that even ten years later--twenty, thirty--it still aches.

Some pasts exist as a fog that rolls in and out of the present, formed not by air that condenses into mist but memories that condense into tiny doors that open to forgotten moments. Maybe you glance at a stranger on a crowded street who reminds you of a childhood friend or hear a song that was popular the first summer you fell in love, and in the space of that single beat of time you are flung backward to a who or when long past. And yet it is only for that one beat. Those tiny doors never remain open for long for most of us. They ensure our former times are kept as relics, and the dust upon them is wiped clean only occasionally

...to see her sitting there and looking up at the stars, that means something. It might not if things go wrong, but right now it does. He gave her the mountains and the stars, not to own but at least to look at, and that means a lot.

Oh, you mean like Orpheo rescuing Euniphon from the Underworld?” said Roland. Rob Anybody just stared. “It’s a myth from Ephebe,” Roland went on. “It’s supposed to be a love story, but it’s really a metaphor for the annual return of summer. There’s a lot of versions of that story.” (...) “A metaphor is a kind o’ lie to help people understand what’s true,” said Billy Bigchin, but this didn’t help much.

Here’s to us. May we do business that makes us happy and leaves us satisfied.

187 is the California Penal Code designation for murder.

dead, like unique, is a word that cannot, by its nature, be modified.

is killing for honor better than killing for money? Probably not, but that won’t stop him.

When

the best writing is about strong emotion recalled in tranquility.

Maybe a person’s last job shouldn’t just be the most lucrative; maybe it should also be the most interesting.

The Bible has a story to puncture every equivocation and denial. The Bible—New Testament as well as Old—does not forgive.

Lady Justice is based on Iustice, a Roman goddess more or less invented by the emperor Augustus.

She sighs. “This has got to be the deadest neighborhood in the whole city.” Billy thinks of telling her that dead, like unique, is a word that cannot, by its nature, be modified. He doesn’t because she’s right.

BILLY: When Graham and I were kids, our mom used to take us to this community pool during the summer. And this one time, Graham was sitting on the edge of the pool, toward the deep end. And this was before he could swim. And I stood there next to him, and my brain went, I could push him in. And that terrified the hell out of me. I didn’t want to push him in. I would never push him in but…it scared me that the only thing between this moment of calm and the biggest tragedy of my life was me choosing not to do it. That really tripped me out, that everyone’s life was that precarious. That there wasn’t some all-knowing mechanism in place that stopped things that shouldn’t happen from happening. That’s something that had always scared me. And that’s how it felt being around Daisy Jones.

bigpapi982: No transfer of funds yet. He wants to know where you are. Billy texts back under one of his own communication aliases. DizDiz77: People in hell want ice water.

in a world where a conman can get elected president anything is possible.

He opens the laptop he thought he’d lost,

Did you know that you could sit in front of a screen or a pad of paper and change the world?

He had gone back to wherever those guys go after they set their plots in motion.

West Nine were, and Bucky named them off: Colorado, Wyoming, Montana, Utah, Arizona, New Mexico, Idaho, Oregon, and—of course—Nevada.

ten bucks

use the Glock and it jammed.

.357 King Cobra revolver.

the bastard child of a supermarket and a mega-church.

Real-world events are never quite the same as the ones you see in your head, but this work always begins with the seeing.

protective custody,

in a world where a conman can get elected president

I guess most jokes have some truth in them, and that is what makes them funny.

I guess most jokes have some truth in them, and thanks what makes them funny.

That no one will ever see it, except maybe for Alice Maxwell, doesn't phase Billy in the slightest. It's the doing that's important.

fairy tale fabulism

You see where this is going?” Billy does, absolutely. “Not really.

There was even a trailer park. A nice one with carriage lamps and gravel lanes, granted, but a trailer park is a trailer park.

Billy likes people, and he likes to keep them at arms’ length.

far from the brightest bulb in the chandelier

Small enough to carry in your purse. It’s loaded, so be careful how you grab it if you have to take it out.

at Klerke’s estate in Montauk Point.

Scarlett O’Hara said, don’t you?” Bucky Hanson grins. “ ‘I’ll think about it tomorrow, for tomorrow is another day.

Used to be a resort hotel there, but it burned flat many a moon ago.” He drops his voice. “It was reputed to be haunted.

and Bondo around the headlights

her very Trumpian prejudice,

never got a chance to show Nick the slogan on his T-shirt, but now he calls it out to her.

Weren’t they the other way around before? And aren’t the lions closer?

trommer

a conman can get elected president

Some were bullshit and some were not, but they all worked at least some of the time: thumping wens and swellings with the side of a book to make them disappear (he called it the Bible cure),

Picnic, Lightning It is possible to be struck by a meteor or a single-engine plane while reading in a chair at home. Safes drop from rooftops and flatten the odd pedestrian mostly within the panels of the comics, but still, we know it is possible, as well as the flash of summer lightning, the thermos toppling over, spilling out on the grass. And we know the message can be delivered from within. The heart, no valentine, decides to quit after lunch, the power shut off like a switch, or a tiny dark ship is unmoored into the flow of the body’s rivers, the brain a monastery, defenseless on the shore. This is what I think about when I shovel compost into a wheelbarrow, and when I fill the long flower boxes, then press into rows the limp roots of red impatiens— the instant hand of Death always ready to burst forth from the sleeve of his voluminous cloak. Then the soil is full of marvels, bits of leaf like flakes off a fresco, red-brown pine needles, a beetle quick to burrow back under the loam. Then the wheelbarrow is a wilder blue, the clouds a brighter white, and all I hear is the rasp of the steel edge against a round stone, the small plants singing with lifted faces, and the click of the sundial as one hour sweeps into the next.

BACK IN SCHOOL, I loved ending stories that way. It’s the perfect conclusion, isn’t it? Billy went to school. He had a good day. Then he died. The end. It doesn’t leave you hanging. It wraps everything up nice and neat. Except in my case, it didn’t. Maybe you’re thinking, Oh, Magnus, you didn’t really die. Otherwise you couldn’t be narrating this story. You just came close. Then you were miraculously rescued, blah, blah, blah. Nope. I actually died. One hundred percent: guts impaled, vital organs burned, head smacked into a frozen river from forty feet up, every bone in my body broken, lungs filled with ice water. The medical term for that is dead. Gee, Magnus, what did it feel like? It hurt. A lot. Thanks for asking. I

Margaret Mitchell won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction for Gone With the Wind in 1937. She was 37 years old at the time. Margaret Chase Smith was elected to the Senate for the first time in 1948 at the age of 49. Ruth Gordon picked up her first Oscar in 1968 for Rosemary’s Baby. She was 72 years old. Billie Jean King took the battle of women’s worth to a tennis court in Houston’s Astrodome to outplay Bobby Riggs. She was 31 years of age. Grandma Moses began a painting career at the age of 76. Anne Morrow Lindbergh followed in the shadow of her husband until she began to question the meaning of existence for individual women. She published her thoughts in Gift from the Sea in 1955, at 49. Shirley Temple Black was Ambassador to Ghana at the age of 47. Golda Meir in 1969 was elected prime minister of Israel. She had just turned 71. This summer Barbara Jordan was given official duties as a speaker at the Democratic National Convention. She is 40 years old. You can tell yourself these people started out as exceptional. You can tell yourself they had influence before they started. You can tell yourself the conditions under which they achieved were different from yours. Or you can be like a woman I knew who sat at her kitchen window year after year and watched everyone else do it and then said to herself, “It’s my turn.” I was 37 years old at the time.

I took out the second one and the third threw himself against the cement railing, maybe thinking it would give him cover. It didn’t. It was too low. I shot him in the back. He lay still. No body armor. He probably believed that Allah had his six but Allah was busy elsewhere that day.

Billie wants me to stroll with her down towards the caves but I dont want to get up from the sand where I’m sitting back to boulder—She goes alone—I suddenly remember James Joyce and stare at the waves realizing “All summer you were sitting here writing the so called sound of the waves not realizing how deadly serious our life and doom is, you fool, you happy kid with a pencil, dont you realize you’ve been using words as a happy game—all those marvelous skeptical things you wrote about graves and sea death it’s ALL TRUE YOU FOOL! Joyce is dead! The sea took him! it will take YOU!

-Are you ready to return to the outside world, Billy? -No, definitely not, sir. -Well, you can't stay here forever now, can you? -Why not? I'm not bothering anybody, sir. -Because it's not healthy. You're a very special young man, Billy. It's time you found that out on your own, out there. The world may not be as terrible as you think. -I would like to stay here one more month, if I may, sir. -One more month? Why? -Summer will be over, sir. I can't go out there if it's going to be summertime. -And why not? -I wouldn't want to see any young girls playing. I would not want to see any flowers outside. -Why? -Because everything happy right now is going to die. -But Billy... -I would not like to be reminded of anything pretty. -But Billy, of course, anything might... -I would not like to be reminded. -OK, OK. We will se what we can do, Billy.

The money was rolling in. I wanted to make smart decisions with it so I went out with a realtor for one day, and found a pad in Laurel Canyon and bought it. Pretty soon, Graham unofficially moved in. We spent that spring and summer just the two of us together. We’d grill on the patio for dinner and go see shows every night and sleep late in the mornings. GRAHAM: Karen and I spent whole weekends high as shit, rich as hell, playing songs together, and not telling anybody where we were or what we were up to. It was our little secret. I didn’t even tell Billy. People say that life keeps moving, but they don’t mention that it does stop sometimes, just for you. Just for you and your girl. The world stops spinning and just lets you two lie there. Feels like it, anyway. Sometimes. If you’re lucky. Call me a romantic if you have to. Worse things to be.

Cletus Byron Winston, you are being rude.” I might have my own less than glowing thoughts about my father, but he was my father. He opened his mouth to respond, then snapped it shut and did a double take, his eyes narrowing on me. “First of all, how do you know my middle name?” “Your momma used to use it when you were naughty, when you boys would help her shelve books in the library. ‘Cletus Byron! Stop stuffing Astrophysics Monthly down your pants!’” Cletus grinned. Then he chuckled. His eyes lost some of their zealous focus as he pushed away from the tree and strolled closer. “Oh yeah. She did, didn’t she?” “I felt sorry for Billy, though.” I scooched to one side as he sat down. “His name always confused everyone, like your momma was trying to talk to Shakespeare’s ghost. ‘William Shakespeare, would you please stop Beauford from pulling down his pants in front of the girls?’” Cletus laughed harder, leaning backward and holding his stomach. “I remember that. How old was Beau?” “He was ten. He was trying to show us his new Tarzan underwear. I don’t think he meant any harm.” “He sure did love that underwear.” Cletus nodded and he scratched his beard. “I’m going to have to find him some Tarzanunderwear in adult size.” “So you can torture him about it?” He pretended to be shocked by my accusation. “Certainly not. I don’t torture my siblings.” “Yeah, right.” I gave him my side-eye. “You forget, I’m a people watcher. I know you sell embarrassing pictures of them onstock photo sites. Jethro was griping about it after church over the summer. If it’s not torture, what do you call it then?” He lifted his chin proudly. “I offer invaluable character building opportunities. I help them reach their true potential through suffering.” “Oh, please

Since Monday, it has been raining buoyant summer rain shot through with sun, but dark at night and full of sound, full of dripping leaves, watery chimings, sleepless scuttlings. Billy Bob is wide-awake, dry-eyed, though everything he does is a little frozen and his tongue is as stiff as a bell tongue. It has not been easy for him, Miss Bobbit’s going. Because she’d meant more than that. Than what? Than being thirteen years old and crazy in love. She was the queer things in him, like the pecan tree and liking books and caring enough about people to let them hurt him. She was the things he was afraid to show anyone else. And in the dark the music trickled through the rain: won’t there be nights when we will hear it just as though it were really there? And afternoons when the shadows will be all at once confused, and she will pass before us, unfurling across the lawn like a pretty piece of ribbon?

This is good work, he feels sure of it, but what felt light when he started now feels heavy, because he has a responsibility to make the rest just as good, and he’s not sure he can do it. He goes to the periscope window and looks out at more nothing, wondering if he’s just discovered why so many would-be writers are unable to finish what they have started. He thinks of “The Things They Carried”, surely one of the best books about war ever written, maybe the best. He thinks writing is also a kind of war, one you fight with yourself. The story is what you carry and every time you add to it, it gets heavier.

He boots up his story and scrolls down to where Taco was handing the squad bullhorn to Fareed, their terp. He’s about to pick up where he left off when Merton Richter interrupted him, then notices there’s a picture on the wall. He gets up for a closer look, because it’s in the far corner—weird place for a painting—and the morning light doesn’t quite reach there. It appears to show a bunch of hedges that have been clipped into animal shapes. There’s a dog on the left, a couple of rabbits on the right, two lions in the middle, and what might be a bull behind the lions. Or maybe it’s supposed to be a rhinoceros. It’s a poorly executed thing, the greens of the animals too violent, and the artist has for some reason plinked a dab of red in the lions’ eyes to give them a devilish aspect. Billy takes the painting down and turns it to face the wall. He knows that if he doesn’t his eyes will be continually drawn to it. Not because it’s good but because it isn’t.

I’m wondering what it would be like to be kissed by you.” “Let’s not go there,” he said. “I don’t want to mess up our friendship.” “It wouldn’t,” she said, grinning suddenly. “I’d like to know how it feels. I mean, as an experiment.” “Put the wrong chemicals together, and they explode.” She frowned. “Are you saying you don’t think I’d like it? Or that I would?” “It doesn’t matter, because I’m not going to kiss you.” She looked up at him shyly, from beneath lowered lashes, and gave him a cajoling smile. “Just one teeny, weeny little kiss?” He laughed at her antics. Inside his stomach, about a million butterflies had taken flight. “Don’t play games with me, Summer.” He said it with a smile, but it was a warning. One she ignored. She crooked her finger and wiggled it, gesturing him toward her. “Come here, and give me a little kiss.” She was doing something sultry with her eyes, something she’d never done before. She’d turned on some kind of feminine heat, because he was burning up just looking at her. “Stop this,” he said in a guttural voice. She canted her hip and put her hand on it, drawing his attention in that direction, then slid her tongue along the seam of her lips to wet them. “I’m ready, bad boy. What are you waiting for?” His heart was beating a hundred miles a minute. He was hot and hard and ready. And if he touched her, he was going to ruin everything. “I’m not going to kiss you, Summer.” He saw the disappointment flash in her eyes. Saw the determination replace it. “All right. I’ll kiss you.” He could have stopped her. He was the one with the powerful arms and the broad chest and the long, strong legs. But he wanted that kiss. “Fine,” he said. “Don’t expect fireworks. I’m only doing this because we’re friends.” And if she believed that, he had some desert brushland he could sell her. Suddenly, she seemed uncertain, and he felt a pang of loss. Silly to feel it so deeply, when kissing Summer had been the last thing he’d allowed himself to dream about. Although, to be honest, he hadn’t always been able to control his dreams. She’d been there, all right. Hot and wet and willing. He made himself smile at her. “Don’t worry, kid. It was a bad idea. To be honest, I value our friendship too much—” She threw herself into his arms, clutching him around the neck, so he had to catch her or get bowled over. “Whoa, there,” he said, laughing and hugging her with her feet dangling in the air. “It doesn’t matter that you’ve changed your mind about wanting that kiss. I’m just glad to be your friend.” She leaned back in his embrace, searching his eyes, looking for something. Before he could do or say anything to stop her, she pressed her lips softly against his. His whole body went rigid. “Billy,” she murmured against his lips. “Please. Kiss me back.” “Summer, I don’t—” She pressed her lips against his again, damp and pliant and inviting. He softened his mouth against hers, felt the plumpness of her upper lip, felt the open, inviting seam, and let his tongue slide along the length of it. “Oh.” She broke the kiss and stared at him with dazed eyes. Eyes that sought reason where there was none. He wanted to rage at her for ruining everything. They could never be friends now. Not now that he’d tasted her, not now that she’d felt his want and his need. He lowered his head to take her mouth, to take what he’d always wanted.