C Boyle Quotes

But then, that’s the beauty of writing stories—each one is an exploratory journey in search of a reason and a shape. And when you find that reason and that shape, there’s no feeling like it." [Peter Wild Interviews TC Boyle, 3:AM Magazine, June 2003]

There are always surprises. Life may be inveterately grim and the surprises disproportionately unpleasant, but it would be hardly worth living if there were no exceptions, no sunny days, no acts of random kindness.

Pleasure, I remind myself, is inseparable from its lawfully wedded mate, pain.

Why ruin my sister's birthday simply because the entire planet was going to hell in a hand basket?

First you have nothing, and then, astonishingly, after ripping out your brain and your heart and betraying your friends and ex-lovers and dreaming like a zombie over the page till you can't see or hear or smell or taste, you have something.

I've always been a quitter. I quit the Boy Scouts, the glee club, the marching band. Gave up my paper route, turned my back on the church, stuffed the basketball team. I dropped out of college, sidestepped the army with a 4-F on the grounds of mental instability, went back to school, made a go of it, entered a Ph.D. program in nineteenth-century British literature, sat in the front row, took notes assiduously, bought a pair of horn-rims, and quit on the eve of my comprehensive exams. I got married, separated, divorced. Quit smoking, quit jogging, quit eating red meat. I quit jobs: digging graves, pumping gas, selling insurance, showing pornographic films in an art theater in Boston. When I was nineteen I made frantic love to a pinch-faced, sack-bosomed girl I'd known from high school. She got pregnant. I quit town.

Writing is a habit, an addiction, as powerful and overmastering an urge as putting a bottle to your lips or a spike in your arm. Call it the impulse to make something out of nothing, call it an obsessive-compulsive disorder, call it logorrhea. Have you been in a bookstore lately? Have you seen what these authors are doing, the mountainous piles of the flakes of themselves they're leaving behind, like the neatly labeled jars of shit, piss, and toenail clippings one of John Barth's characters bequeathed to his wife, the ultimate expression of his deepest self?

In order to create you have to believe in your ability to do so and that often means excluding whole chunks of normal life, and, of course, pumping yourself up as much as possible as a way of keeping on. Sort of cheering for yourself in the great football stadium of life." (Barnes & Noble Review, email dialogue with Cameron Martin, Feb. 09, 2009)

She didn't recognize him and he didn't recognize her, because people and places change and what once was will never be again.

They wore each other like a pair of socks. From "Love of my Life

Sometimes, when she's out here alone, she can feel the pulse of something bigger, as if all things animate were beating in unison, a glory and a connection that sweeps her out of herself, out of her consciousness, so that nothing has a name, not in Latin, not in English, not in any known language.

This was what he was born for. This was what made sense. The only thing.

I am concerned with social and environmental issues. What rational person is not? But advocacy and art do not mix. Art is a seduction. Good art invites the reader to think and feel deeply and come to his/her own conclusions.

The moment we pulled up in front of her apartment she had the door open. She turned to me with the long, elegant, mournful face of her Puritan ancestors and held out her hand. 'It's been fun,' she said. 'Yes,' I said, taking her hand. She was wearing gloves.

I have an idea and a first line -- and that suggests the rest of it. I have little concept of what I’m going to say, or where it’s going. I have some idea of how long it’s going to be -- but not what will happen or what the themes will be. That’s the intrigue of doing it -- it’s a process of discovery. You get to discover what you’re going to say and what it’s going to mean.

Who was she in high school? Little Miss Nobody. She could have embroidered it on her sweaters, tattooed it across her forehead. And in small letters: i am shit, i am anonymous, step on me. please. She wasn't voted Most Humorous in her high school yearbook or Best Dancer or Most Likely to Succeed, and she wasn't in the band or Spanish Club and when her ten year reunion rolled around nobody would recognize her or have a single memory to share.

It's not going in that end!

But then all writers smoke, don't they? And drink? And sit in front of computer screens till their arteries clog and muscles atrophy?

Besides, to like something, to really like it and come out and say so, is taking a terrible risk. I mean, what if I'm wrong? What if it's really no good?

I do feel that literature should be demystified. What I object to is what is happening in our era: literature is only something you get at school as an assignment. No one reads for fun, or to be subversive or to get turned on to something. It's just like doing math at school. I mean, how often do we sit down and do trigonometry for fun, to relax. I've thought about this, the domination of the literary arts by theory over the past 25 years -- which I detest -- and it's as if you have to be a critic to mediate between the author and the reader and that's utter crap. Literature can be great in all ways, but it's just entertainment like rock'n'roll or a film. It is entertainment. If it doesn't capture you on that level, as entertainment, movement of plot, then it doesn't work. Nothing else will come out of it. The beauty of the language, the characterisation, the structure, all that's irrelevant if you're not getting the reader on that level -- moving a story. If that's friendly to readers, I cop to it.

She was at sea. She knew the rocking of the boat as intimately now as if she’d never known anything else, felt the muted drone of the engines deep inside her, in the thump of her heart and the pulse of her blood. At sea. She was at sea.

He regarded marriage as an arbitrary and essentially adversarial relationship, akin to the yoking of prisoners on the chain gang.

He thought of Christ with his cross and his crown of thorns and wondered who had it worse.

At best, I consider flying an unavoidable necessity, a time to resurrect forgotten prayers and contemplate the end of all joy in a twisted howling heap of machinery; at worst, I rank it right up there with psychotic episodes and torture at the hands of malevolent strangers.

Music was like food, like water, like air - that necessary, that essential - and here she was in a break-on-through mood and nothing for it but her own stumbling version caught like lint on her tongue.

I SHALL WIN!" She exclaimed. "You'll see! When the smoke of battle clears away I shall be a rainbow again--and, undying name--an altar of fire that you have tried to dash to hell. I shall weave a rose wreath and hang it round your neck. You will call it a yoke of bondage and curse it--no matter. You are afraid of the light I give you. You crouch in the darkness. Come, take my hand, I will lead you." And her valediction, intimating in its restraint whole words of love and grief and passionate regret, was, simply, Miriam.

To readers who tend to think primarily in terms of liking or disliking characters: these people are fictional. They do not stand before us asking to be liked. They stand before us asking to be read. They ask to be seen and heard and maybe even understood, or at least for their motives to be understood, if that is what the author is after. But, for the sake of argument, let’s pretend these characters are in fact real, that they are human beings standing before us. Let us open up at least a little to those we might not like—in their presence, we might experience something new. To me, facing those we might not want to face is crucial to living in a diverse world.

To Judy Blume, Ann M. Martin, Lois Lowry, and V. C. Andrews; to Eva Hoffman and Lorrie Moore; to Barbara Trapido, Toni Morrison, and Dostoevsky; to TC Boyle, and Miłosz and Szymborska; to Frank McCourt and Francine Prose; to Márquez and Bukowski—my first loves, my mad loves, my many loves, too many to name.

War der Mensch bei seiner Geburt eine tabula rasa, ungeformt und ohne Ideen, bereit, von der Gesellschaft beschrieben zu werden, erziehbar und imstande, auf dem Weg zur Vervollkommnung voranzuschreiten? Oder stellte die Gesellschaft, wie Rousseau behauptete, einen verderblichen Einfluss dar und nicht das Fundament alles Richtigen und Guten?

Er war jetzt ein Wesen der Wände und Zimmer, ein Sklave des Essens [...].

He dug wells for a living and his customers were cattle ranchers and wheat farmers, which meant they were always about to go broke, except when they were rich.

This was about the needs of the you.

At first, she was disappointed, but she was patient, infinitely patient, rooted to the ground by the boredom of the days.

It was just past dawn, in the perfidious part of the day that implied anything was possible when, really, nothing was very likely.

They wore each other like a pair of socks.

…I thought I'd never seen such a miracle as the way the muscles of her thighs and buttocks flexed and relaxed in the grip of her jeans.

would be hell to pay when he got home. But the devil was in the back seat, keeping time to the music, and hell was a long way up the road.

If you’re reading to find friends, you’re in deep trouble. We read to find life, in all its possibilities.

For Newton, as for Boyle and Descartes, there were laws of nature only because there had been a [Divine] Legislator.

A mother’s rage was too incandescent to blaze unshaded.

He’d been up early all his life and though everybody said the best thing about retirement was sleeping in, he just couldn’t feature it. If he found himself in bed later than six he felt like a degenerate,

It was then that my gaze happened to fall on the bookcase, on the gap there, where the old paperback of "Nine Stories" had fallen flat. "Where's the thing?" I said. "What thing?" "The mesh. My mesh." She shrugged. "I tossed it." "Tossed it? Where? What do you mean?" In the next moment I was in the kitchen, flipping open the lid of the trash can, only to find it empty. "You mean outside?" I shouted. "In the dumpster?" When I came thundering back into the room, she still hadn't moved. "Jesus, what were you thinking? That was mine. I wanted that. I wanted to keep it." Her lips barely moved. "It was dirty.

The thought arrested her and she pulled away from him just to stand there a moment and take in the strangeness of it all. Music drifted down to her then, an odd tinkling sort of music with a rippling rhythmic undercurrent that seemed to tug the melody in another direction altogether, into the depths of a deep churning sea, but beautiful for all that, and so perfect and unexpected. She felt languid and free--all eyes were on her, every man turning to stare--and it came to her that she loved this place, this moment, these people. She could stay here forever, right here, in the gentle sway of the Japanese night.

These occasions always took him by surprise. He was shocked anew each time the crisply surveyed, neatly kept world he so cherished rose up to confront him with all its essential sloppiness, irrationality, and bad business sense.

A glad zest and hopefulness might be inspired even in the most jaded and ennui-cursed, were there in our homes such simple, truthful natures as that of my heroine, and it is in the sphere of quiet homes—not elsewhere—I believe that a woman can best rule and save the world.

He proposed an imitation game. There would be a man (A), a woman (B) and an interrogator (C) in a separate room, reading the written answers from the others, trying to work out which was the woman. B would be trying to hinder the process. Now, said Turing, imagine that A was replaced by a computer. Could the interrogator tell whether they were talking to a machine or not after five minutes of questioning? He gave snatches of written conversation to show how difficult the Turing Test would be: Q: Please write me a sonnet on the subject of the Forth Bridge. A: Count me out on this one. I never could write poetry. To imitate that a computer would need deep knowledge of social mores and the use of language. To pass the Turing Test the computer would have to do more than imitate. It would have to be a learning entity.

He'd been a fool, he saw that now. How could he have thought, even for a minute, that they'd be safe out here in the suburbs? The world was violent, rotten, corrupt, seething with hatred and perversion, and there was no escaping it. Everything you worked for, everything you loved, had to be locked up as if you were in a castle under siege.

But as he lay there watching the sparks climb into the sky, the wine infesting his veins, he knew how it was going to be, how it had to be, knew he would follow her into that hut and slap his own pain out of her, and that was so sick and so bad he wanted nothing more in that moment than to die. But then dead men didn't work either, did they?

Look to society, and look to the crapshoot of the way any given set of parents’ genes line up. How was Raskolnikov created? How about the “patriots” who assaulted the Capitol Building? We live in our own private realities, and sometimes—too often—those private realities have nothing to do with the larger world around us. I speak from the point of view of a novelist, a profession to which only the delusional are called.

Given an area of law that legislators were happy to hand over to the affected industries and a technology that was both unfamiliar and threatening, the prospects for legislative insight were poor. Lawmakers were assured by lobbyists a) that this was business as usual, that no dramatic changes were being made by the Green or White papers; or b) that the technology presented a terrible menace to the American cultural industries, but that prompt and statesmanlike action would save the day; or c) that layers of new property rights, new private enforcers of those rights, and technological control and surveillance measures were all needed in order to benefit consumers, who would now be able to “purchase culture by the sip rather than by the glass” in a pervasively monitored digital environment. In practice, somewhat confusingly, these three arguments would often be combined. Legislators’ statements seemed to suggest that this was a routine Armageddon in which firm, decisive statesmanship was needed to preserve the digital status quo in a profoundly transformative and proconsumer way. Reading the congressional debates was likely to give one conceptual whiplash. To make things worse, the press was—in 1995, at least—clueless about these issues. It was not that the newspapers were ignoring the Internet. They were paying attention—obsessive attention in some cases. But as far as the mainstream press was concerned, the story line on the Internet was sex: pornography, online predation, more pornography. The lowbrow press stopped there. To be fair, the highbrow press was also interested in Internet legal issues (the regulation of pornography, the regulation of online predation) and constitutional questions (the First Amendment protection of Internet pornography). Reporters were also asking questions about the social effect of the network (including, among other things, the threats posed by pornography and online predators).

Ticchettio d'ingranaggi. Rumore di pistoni. Sbuffi di vapore. Boyle. Rufus Leddy Boyle, lo scienziato pazzo. Henry sentì crescere dentro di sé la paura, come albume d'uovo montato a neve. In che mani era finito? Tentò ancora di muoversi, ma invano. L'ombra dell'uomo che aveva appena parlato gli coprì il viso. «So che potete sentirmi, lord Demison. Sono il colonnello Comask». Pausa. Anche l'uomo chiamato “dottor Boyle” entrò nel campo visivo di Henry. Poi il colonnello proseguì: «Avete servito egregiamente la corona, ma date le circostanze, credo che sia opportuno congedarvi. Non c'è urgenza di recuperare i documenti. E, almeno per il momento, la vostra missione è compiuta». Fece un saluto militare. «Ci rivedremo a Londra». Salutò il dottore e se ne andò. Henry era ancora impossibilitato a muoversi. Vide il dottor Boyle farsi più vicino e togliersi gli occhialini di protezione. Gli lesse negli occhi una strana mescolanza di orgoglio e compassione. «Bentornato tra i civili, lord Demison», disse l'uomo con insolita dolcezza. «E benvenuto nella vostra nuova vita».

Because of that, just days after taking office as prime minister, Churchill was preparing for the ultimate emergency – the potential loss of most of the British army. The War Minister Anthony Eden had already announced the formation of the Home Guard, and asked able-bodied men to come forward. A huge number did so. Later that same evening (14 May), the BBC had broadcast this announcement: “The Admiralty have made an order directing the owners of self-propelled pleasure craft between thirty and one hundred feet in length to send all particulars to the Admiralty within fourteen days from today, if they have not already been offered or requisitioned. By this day, five days later, retired Rear Admiral Alfred Taylor had been given powers to collect and pay crews of small craft which might be used by navy, and was gathering them at Sheerness in the Thames estuary. The man in charge of finding the ships, H. C. Riggs, was now sleeping at the offices of the Ministry of Shipping in Berkeley Square, one of the administrative heroes of Dunkirk, and was collecting information on small ships that might be available and holding them in port. The clerks at the Admiralty were printing copies of form T124, which signed people up for 90 days short service in the navy.

gnawed at the wicker bars of its cage and the little air conditioner

Never repaired, his glasses looked as if they'd been thrown at his face, dirty grayish lumps of Reba's sticking plaster holding the frames together in a tentative accord with the forces of gravity.

to lighten to mood,

Disappointed showed all over his face.

hanger

and start to rub them.

Sides,

decent,

Laura, be Laura.

affixation.

Me either.

Or copulating, whichever the case may be.

both the women

That, is the equivalent of a tar pit

three thousand pounds of steel and glass and plastic that no thing made out of flesh could resist. A car.

Or was she just talking, was she one of those people—women, for the most part—who just talk to round out the sonic spectrum?

Survival Movement in Hostile Areas,” most of which he could have quoted verbatim if somebody asked him, but really all you had to know was the acronym BLISS: B—Blends in with the surroundings L—Low in silhouette I—Irregular in shape S—Small in size S—Secluded

The golf course. He never thought he’d sink so low, but he did, like every other old duffer across the land.

If you’re reading to find friends, you’re in deep trouble. We read to find life, in all its possibilities. The relevant question isn’t ‘Is this a potential friend for me?’ but ‘Is this character alive?

We didn’t have jobs, not in any real sense—jobs were a myth, a rumor—so we held on in grad school, semester after semester, for lack of anything better to do. We got financial aid, of course, and accrued debt on our student loans. Our car, a hand-me-down from Mallory’s mother, needed tires and probably everything else into the bargain. We wrote papers, graded papers, got A’s and B’s in the courses we took, and doled out A’s and B’s in the courses we taught. Sometimes we felt as if we were actually getting somewhere, but the truth was, like most people, we were just marking time.

He wanted to talk about her-he was full of her-but he was telling a fine line here.He and Terry were men of the world and men of the world didn't moon over their woman.

I was not okay for one thing.For another, I'd passed from simple misanthropy to nihilism, death of the spirit and beyond.

I note that I’ve lived longer in the past now than I can expect to live in the future. I have more to remember than I have to look forward to. Memory fades, not much of the past stays, and I wouldn’t mind forgetting a lot more of it. Once

So he learned to look like he was working when he worked. He learned to act like a father when his daughter was around, to look like a husband when Marnie needed a husband. He did what people expected him to or maybe a little more.

Das sind mehr als Kopfschmerzen, das ist ein generalisiertes zugrunde richten.

I went down and fixed her a BLT, her soft syllables tingling in my ears like a kiss.

A new instrument with an evil-sounding name is helping scientists see how stars are born. L.U.C.I.F.E.R., which stands for ‘Large Binocular Telescope Near-infrared Utility with Camera and Integral Field Unit for Extragalactic Research,’ is a chilled instrument attached to a telescope in Arizona. And yes, it’s named for the Devil, whose name itself means ‘morning star’ [and which] happens to be right next to the Vatican Observatory on Mt. Graham in Tucson.” ­—Rebecca Boyle, Popular Science magazine

Things came toppling down on you, whole mountainsides, and there was nothing anybody could do about it. If you were lucky - very, very lucky - you got to step out of the way.

We found each other in Hollywood, as Minnesotan expatriates always do, common sense driving them together—though to leave the Land of Ten Thousand Lakes for a thirsty city built on a desert may speak of some interior flaw.

I’ve always been a huge fan of theater and performance. The idea of just the human voice and just this night. Live music is just the same. They’re doing it for you right now. It’s an amazing thing. And if you perform a story properly, it can be transporting too.

Father Gregory Boyle, put it best in his book, Tattoos on the Heart: “You stand with the least likely to succeed until success is succeeded by something more valuable: kinship. You stand with the belligerent, the surly, and the badly behaved until bad behavior is recognized for the language it is: the vocabulary of the deeply wounded and of those whose burdens are more than they can bear.

The point on its orbit where it is most distant from Earth is known as apogee, and the point where it is closest is known as perigee. Three or four times a year the perigee coincides with a full Moon, which astrologers in the first part of the twenty-first century c.e. dubbed a “supermoon.” The closer Moon yields exceptionally high and low tides. The more distant, apogee Moon—call it a micromoon—is slightly smaller in the night sky and has a weaker pull. But even a faraway Moon exerts a powerful influence over Earth.