Revolutionary Road Book Quotes

I’m sure it’s probably a mistake to try and draw your own conclusions from the things you read in books. Who knows?

A revolutionary army can sometimes win by enthusiasm, but a conscript army has got to win with weapons,

Being alone has nothing to do with how many people are around”? From Richard Yates’s Revolutionary Road,

the shelves on shelves of unread or half-read or read-and-forgotten books that had always been supposed to make such a difference and never had; the loathsome, gloating maw of the television set;

In the East, he then believed, a man went to college not for vocational training but in disciplined search for wisdom and beauty, and nobody over the age of twelve believed that those words were for sissies. In the East, wearing rumpled tweeds and flannels, he could have strolled for hours among ancient elms and clock towers, talking with his friends, and his friends would have been the cream of their generation. The girls of the East were marvelously slim and graceful; they moved with the authority of places like Bennington and Holyoke; they spoke intelligently in low, subtle voices, and they never giggled. On sharp winter evenings you could meet them for cocktails at the Biltmore and take them to the theater, and afterwards, warmed with brandy, they would come with you for a drive to a snowbound New England inn, where they’d slip happily into bed with you under an eiderdown quilt. In the East, when college was over, you could put off going seriously to work until you’d spent a few years in a book-lined bachelor flat, with intervals of European travel, and when you found your true vocation at last it was through a process of informed and unhurried selection; just as when you married at last it was to solemnize the last and best of your many long, sophisticated affairs.

We’ve all got a dozen or so friends, haven’t we? And when we’re drunk we philosophise well into the night on an array of subjects ranging from what happened before the Big Bang to who would win a fight between a vampire and zombie, to what’s the most compromising position to be caught in, but we’re hardly going to be extolled in 60 or 70 years’ time as the Heat Generation or the Cheat Generation or the Street Generation, are we? The Tweet Generation, maybe, but that’s about all. So what was it about these few guys? Well, they wrote about what they did, and what they did was quite revolutionary back then. They went On the Road, and it was Jack Kerouac’s book that turned the tide.

Khomeini and Khamenei were everywhere; on giant billboards at the roadside, as vast lurid murals on concrete apartment blocks and, less impressively, on sagging vinyl banners outside schools and mosques. With their almost identical appearance and surnames they reminded me of an Islamic Thomson and Thompson, the hapless detectives of the Tintin books. But that, I feared, was where the similarity ended.

Like a shepherd and sheep, its principle is simple, redirection towards the obligatory path, and speaking of Ozcan, he is the most proficient in this game. Watch the professionals do it in the reorientation of functional organizations. There is no need to recruit them all, it is enough for them to do what a shepherd does with a flock of sheep; blocking the roads in front of them, putting a dog in one place, standing and waving his stick in another place, to force them to take the path he wants, towards the barn. And if you spoke to one of them, it would swear to you that it is going the way it wants, which it chose with its full will, or chosen for them by their leader at the forefront of the herd, who knows the secrets of the ways, believing that they go the way they want. He decided that he should play the game according to its laws since they are sheep, so do not try to address them or convince them, but rather direct them to where you want. He did not know anything about deterministic algorithms at the time, his decision was based on his innate, something inside him. He succeeded, however, by making a butterfly flutter, far away. Some straying out of the Shepherd’s path, then another artificial flutter associated with the first to accelerate the process, and then a third, and a fourth, then the chaos ensued, and the hurricanes blew up all the inevitable of Alpha Headquarters. A butterfly fluttered where no one was watching, he studied and planned it carefully. Words by a revolutionary Palestinian poet, Mahmoud Darwish, summarized the whole story… Throw a stone into the stagnant water, rivers will break out Ring your bells in the kingdom of silence and sing your anthem And let the wall of fear break into dust like pottery

Here, then, as Christians in the West began to go their own way, was a deep paradox: that the more distinctive a vision of the afterlife they came to have, the more it bore witness to its origins in the East. Jewish scripture and Greek philosophy, once again, had blended to potent effect. Indeed, across what had once been Roman provinces, in lands pockmarked by abandoned villas and crumbling basilicas, few aspects of life were as coloured by the distant past as the dread of death. What awaited the soul after it had slipped its mortal shell? If not angels, and the road to heaven, then demons black as the Persians had always imagined the agents of the Lie to be; Satan armoured with an account book, just as tax officials of the vanished empire might have borne; a pit of fire, in which the torments of the damned echoed those described, not by the authors of Holy Scripture, but by the poets of pagan Athens and Rome. It was a vision woven out of many ancient elements; but not a vision that Christians of an earlier age would have recognised. Revolutionary in its implications for the dead, it was to prove revolutionary as well in its implications for the living.

The Riders Placencia Beach, Belize, 1996 Americans aren’t overly familiar with Tim Winton, although in my mind he is one of the best writers anywhere. This novel is set in Ireland and Greece as a man and his daughter search for their missing wife and mother. Gripping. 2. Family Happiness Miacomet Beach, Nantucket, 2001 The finest of Laurie Colwin’s novels, this is, perhaps, my favorite book in all the world. It tells the story of Polly Demarest, a Manhattan woman who is torn between her very uptown lawyer husband and her very downtown artist lover. 3. Mary and O’Neil Cottesloe Beach, Western Australia, 2009 These connected stories by Justin Cronin will leave you weeping and astonished. 4. Appointment in Samarra Nha Trang Beach, Vietnam, 2010 This classic novel was recommended to me by my local independent bookseller, Dick Burns, once he had found out how much I loved Revolutionary Road by Richard Yates. John O’Hara’s novel has all the requisite elements of a page-turner—drinking, swearing, and country club adultery, although set in 1930s Pennsylvania. This may sound odd, but trust me, it’s un-put-downable! 5. Wife 22 Oppenheimer Beach, St. John, U.S. Virgin Islands, 2012 If you like piña coladas… you will love Melanie Gideon’s tale of marriage lost and rediscovered. 6. The Interestings Steps Beach, Nantucket, 2013 And this summer, on Steps Beach in Nantucket, I will be reading The Interestings by Meg Wolitzer. Wolitzer is one of my favorite writers. She explores the battles between the sexes better than anyone around.