Rum Diary Quotes

I was not proud of what I had learned but I never doubted that it was worth knowing.

It gave me a strange feeling, and the rest of that night I didn’t say much, but merely sat there and drank, trying to decide if I was getting older and wiser, or just plain old.

Like most others, I was a seeker, a mover, a malcontent, and at times a stupid hell-raiser. I was never idle long enough to do much thinking, but I felt somehow that some of us were making real progress, that we had taken an honest road, and that the best of us would inevitably make it over the top. At the same time, I shared a dark suspicion that the life we were leading was a lost cause, that we were all actors, kidding ourselves along on a senseless odyssey. It was the tension between these two poles - a restless idealism on one hand and a sense of impending doom on the other - that kept me going.

There was an awful suspicion in my mind that I'd finally gone over the hump, and the worst thing about it was that I didn't feel tragic at all, but only weary, and sort of comfortably detached.

I felt a tremendous distance between myself and everything real.

and the sad notes floated out to the patio and hung in the trees like birds too tired to fly

sounds of life and movement, people getting ready and people giving up, the sound of hope and the sound of hanging on, and behind them all, the quiet, deadly ticking of a thousand hungry clocks...

He had come so far from himself that I don't think he knew who he was anymore.

She was wearing the same clothes, but now she looked haggard and dirty. The delicate illusions that get us through life can only stand so much strain.

Happy," I muttered, trying to pin the word down. But it is one of those words, like Love, that I have never quite understood. Most people who deal in words don’t have much faith in them and I am no exception – especially the big ones like Happy and Love and Honest and Strong. They are too elusive and far to relative when you compare them to sharp, mean little words like Punk and Cheap and Phony. I feel at home with these, because they’re scrawny and easy to pin, but the big ones are tough and it takes either a priest or a fool to use them with any confidence.

A man can live on his wits and his balls for only so long.

No matter how much I wanted all those things that I needed money to buy, there was some devilish current pushing me off in another direction -- toward anarchy and poverty and craziness. That maddening delusion that a man can lead a decent life without hiring himself out as a Judas Goat.

Whatever he might have denied me was unimportant; it was the fact that he could deny me anything at all, even what I didn't want

I wanted to take off all my clothes and never wear them again.

The race is not to the swift, nor the battle to the strong, but to those who can see it coming and jump aside.

I shared a vagrant optimism that some of us were making real progress, that we had taken an honest road, and that the best of us would inevitably make it over the top. At the same time, I felt that the life we were leading was a lost cause, that we were all actor, kidding ourselves on a senseless odyssey. It was the tension between those two poles - a restless idealism on one hand and a sense of impending doom on the other - that kept me going.

The scene I had just witnessed (a couple making love in the ocean) brought back a lot of memories – not of things I had done but of things I had failed to do, wasted hours and frustrated moments and opportunities forever lost because time had eaten so much of my life and I would never get it back. I envied Yeoman and felt sorry for myself at the same time, because I had seen him in a moment that made all my happiness seem dull.

He gave my hand a final shake. “Okay, Kemp,” he said with a grin. “Thanks a lot – you came through like a champ.” “Hell,” I said, starting the engine. “We’re all champs when we’re drunk.

It was the kind of town that made you feel like Humphrey Bogart: you came in on a bumpy little plane, and, for some mysterious reason, got a private room with balcony overlooking the town and the harbor; then you sat there and drank until something happened.

Old God sure was in a good mood when he made this place.

He wandered into the Newsroom and asked for a job the same way he’d walk into a barbershop and ask for a haircut, and with no more idea of being turned down.

With the palms zipping past and the big sun burning down on the road ahead, I had a flash of something I hadn’t felt since my first months in Europe—a mixture of ignorance and a loose, “what the hell” kind of confidence that comes on a man when the wind picks up and he begins to move in a hard straight line toward an unknown horizon.

Why did she have to happen? Just when I was doing so good without her.

In the meantime, I would drink, rest, and ponder the meaning of this mob.

I had come to regard him as a loner with no real past and a future so vague that there was no sense talking about it.

It was a maddening image and the only way to whip it was to hang on until dusk and banish the ghosts with rum.

Though I was careful never to mention it, I began to see a new dimension in everything that happened.

There is something fresh and crisp about the first hours of a Caribbean day, a happy anticipation that something is about to happen, maybe just up the street or around the next corner.

She laughed. 'It won't last. Nothing lasts. But I'm happy now.' 'Happy,' I muttered, trying to pin the word down. But it is one of those words, like Love, that I have never quite understood. Most people who deal in words don't have much faith in them and I am no exception--especially the big ones like Happy and Love and Honest and Strong. They are too elusive and far too relative when you compare them to sharp, mean little words like Punk and Cheap and Phony. I feel at home with these, because they're scrawny and easy to pin, but the big ones are tough and it takes either a priest or a fool to use them with any confidence.

Human beings are the only creatures on Earth that claim a god and the only living thing that behaves like it hasn't got one

we left about midnight and walked down the hill in silence. the night was muggy, and all around me i felt the same pressure, a sense of time rushing by while it seemed to be standing still. whenever i thought of time in puerto rico, i was reminded of those old magnetic clocks that hung on the walls of my classrooms in high school. every now and then a hand would not move for several minutes -- and if i watched it long enough, wondering if it had finally broken down, the sudden click of the hand jumping three for four notches would startle me when it came.

But I knew it was pure masturbation, because down in my gut I wanted nothing more than a clean bed and a bright room and something solid to call my own at least until I got tired of it. There was an awful suspicion in my mind that I'd finally gone over the hump, and the worst thing about it was that I didn't feel tragic at all, but only weary, and sort of comfortably detatched.

They claimed no allegiance to any flag and valued no currency but luck and good contacts.

I harbor a secret urge to whack a salesman in the face, crack his teeth and put red bumps around his eyes.

I was glad to be rid of him. He was one of those people who could go to New York and be "fascinating," but here in his own world he was just a cheap functionary, and a dull one at that.

On the way down the hill we walked three abreast in the cobblestone street, drunk and laughing and talking like men who knew they would separate at dawn and travel to the far corners of the earth.

I bought a small bottle of beer for fifteen cents and sat on a bench in the clearing, feeling like an old man. The scene I had just witnessed brought back a lot of memories - not of things I had done but of things I had failed to do, wasted hours and frustrated moments and opportunities forever lost because time had eaten so much of my life and I would never get it back.

All around us were people I had spent ten years avoiding--shapeless women in wool bathing suits, dull-eyed men with hairless legs and self-conscious laughs, all Americans, all fearsomely alike. These people should be kept at home, I thought; lock them in the basement of some goddamn Elks Club and keep them pacified with erotic movies; if they want a vacation, show them a foreign art film; and if they still aren't satisfied, send them into the wilderness and run them with vicious dogs.

It was the tension between these two poles - a restless idealism on one hand and a sense of impending doom on the other - that kept me going.

Arriving half-drunk in a foreign place is hard on the nerves. You have a feeling that something is wrong, that you can’t get a grip.

I was never idle long enough to do much thinking, but I felt somehow that my instincts were right. I shared a vagrant optimism that some of us were making real progress, that we had taken an honest road, and that the best of us would inevitably make it over the top. I shared a dark suspicion that the life we were leading was a lost cause, that we were all actors, kidding ourselves along on a senseless journey. It was the tension between these two poles--a restless idealism on one hand and a sense of impending doom on the other--that kept me going.

Not much of what he said was original. What made him unique was the fact that he had no sense of detachment at all. He was like the fanatical football fan who runs onto the field and tackles a player. He saw life as the Big Game, and the whole of mankind was divided into two teams -- Sala's Boys, and The Others. The stakes were fantastic and every play was vital -- and although he watched with a nearly obsessive interest, he was very much the fan, shouting unheard advice in a crowd of unheard advisors and knowing all the while that nobody was paying any attention to him because he was not running the team and never would be. And like all fans he was frustrated by the knowledge that the best he could do, even in a pinch, would be to run onto the field and cause some kind of illegal trouble, then be hauled off by guards while the crowd laughed.

The hoofbeats rang through the town like pistol shots.

You forget where you are,” he said. “What right do you have to come here and cause trouble, and then tell us to speak your language?

Listening to him, I realized how long it had been since I’d felt like I had the world by the balls, how many quick birthdays had gone by since that first year in Europe when I was so ignorant and so confident that every splinter of luck made me feel like a roaring champion.

He talked about luck and fate and numbers coming up, yet he never ventured a nickel at the casinos because he knew the house had all the percentages. And beneath his pessimism, his bleak conviction that all the machinery was rigged against him, at the bottom of his soul was a faith that he was going to outwit it, that by carefully watching the signs he was going to know when to dodge and be spared. It was fatalism with a loophole, and all you had to do to make it work was never miss a sign. Survival by coordination, as it were. The race is not to the swift, nor the battle to the strong, but to those who can see it coming and jump aside. Like a frog evading a shillelagh in a midnight marsh.

Those were the good mornings, when the sun was hot and the air was quick and promising, when the Real Business seemed right on the verge of happening and I felt that if I went just a little faster I might overtake that bright and fleeting thing that was always just ahead.

Finally we came over a rise and I saw the Caribbean...My first feeling was a wild desire to drive a stake in the sand and claim the place for myself. The beach was white as salt, and cut off from the world by a ring of steep hills that faced the sea. We were on the edge of a large bay and the water was that clear, turquoise color that you get with a white sand bottom. I had never seen such a place. I wanted to take off all my clothes and never wear them again.

There was no moon, but I could hear the surf a few yards in front of us. I spread my filthy cord coat on the sand for a pillow, then fell down and went to sleep.

Well," he said. "I hope to God I never make forty -- I wouldn't know what to do with myself.

Maybe, God forbid, the place was what it appeared to be—a melange of Okies and thieves and bewildered jíbaros.

Then there was organ music, a sort of feverish dirge, and then I was stepping out of my shorts and into the shower with Chenault. I remember the feel of those soapy little hands washing my back, keeping my eyes tightly shut while my soul fought a hopeless battle with my groin, then giving up like a drowning man and soaking the bed with our bodies.

Cases of champagne and scotch lay broken in the street, and everyone I saw had a bottle. They were screaming and dancing, and in the middle of the crowd a giant Swede wearing a blue jockstrap was blowing long blasts on a trumpet.

Like most of the others, I was a seeker, a mover, a malcontent, and at times a stupid hell-raiser.

The sun woke me up the next morning. I sat up and groaned. My clothes were full of sand.

Few girls look with favor on a man of my stripe, a brutalizer of old people.

Human beings are the only creatures on Earth that claim a God, and the only living thing that behaves like it hasn't got one. Does the world belong to no one but you?

At the Tourist Bureau they talk about the cooling trade winds that caress the shores of Puerto Rico every day and night of the year—but Nelson Otto was a man the trade winds never seemed to touch.

At the same time, I shared a dark suspicion that the life we were leading was a lost cause, that we were all actors, kidding ourselves along on a senseless odyssey. It was the tension between these two poles—a restless idealism on one hand and a sense of impending doom on the other—that kept me going.

They were professionally deviant, but they had a few things in common. They depended, mostly from habit, on newspapers and magazines for the bulk of their income; their lives were geared to long chances and sudden movement; and they claimed no allegiance to any flag and valued no currency but luck and good contacts.

It occurred to me one evening, as I sat by myself in Al’s patio, that a man can live on his wits and his balls for only so long. I’d been doing it for ten years and I had a feeling that my reserve was running low.

Freedom, Truth, Honor—you could rattle off a hundred such words and behind every one of them would gather a thousand punks, pompous little farts, waving the banner with one hand and reaching under the table with the other. I

He was just another noisy little punk in the great legion of punks who march between the banners of bigger and better men. Freedom, Truth, Honour - you could rattle off a hundred such words and behind every one of them would gather a thousand punks, pompous little farts, waving the banner with one hand and reaching under the table with the other.

Sala called for more drink and Sweep brought four rums, saying they were on the house. We thanked him and sat for another half hour, saying nothing. Down on the waterfront I could hear the slow clang of a ship’s bell as it eased against the pier, and somewhere in the city a motorcycle roared through the narrow streets, sending its echo up the hill to Calle O’Leary. Voices rose and fell in the house next door and the raucous sound of a jukebox came from a bar down the street. Sounds of a San Juan night, drifting across the city through layers of humid air; sounds of life and movement, people getting ready and people giving up, the sound of hope and the sound of hanging on, and behind them all, the quiet, deadly ticking of a thousand hungry clocks, the lonely sound of time passing in the long Caribbean night.

The scene I had just witnessed brought back a lot of memories – not of things I have done but of things I have failed to do, wasted hours and frustrated moments and opportunities forever lost because time had eaten so much of my life and I would never get it back.

It was easy to understand why Sala didn’t mind sharing; neither of us ever went there except to change clothes or sleep. Night after night I would sit uselessly at Al’s, drinking myself into a stupor because I couldn’t stand the idea of going back to the apartment.

I sat there a long time, and thought about a lot of things. Foremost among them was the suspicion that my strange and ungovernable instincts might do me in before I had a chance to get rich. No matter how much I wanted all those things that I needed money to buy, there was some devilish current pushing me off in another direction—toward anarchy and poverty and craziness. That maddening delusion that a man can lead a decent life without hiring himself out as a Judas Goat.

Stay away from St. Thomas,' said Sala. 'Bad things happen to people in St. Thomas. I can tell you some incredibly horrible stories.

about to quit.” “Why?” He laughed. “Everybody quits—you’ll quit. Nobody worth a shit can work here.

The minute I saw it, I felt that here was the place I'd been looking for.

Demogorgon,

gimp

He often swore that if all the people who had worked for the paper in those years could appear at one time before the throne of The Almighty—if they all stood there and recited their histories and their quirks and their crimes and their deviations—there was no doubt in his mind that God himself would fall down in a swoon and tear his hair. Of course Lotterman exaggerated;

They were eerie days, and my fatalistic view of Yeamon was not so much conviction as necessity, because if I granted him even the slightest optimism I would have to admit a lot of unhappy things about myself.

But the fact that Segarra was exercising some sinister control over me began to get on my nerves. Whatever he might have denied me was unimportant, it was the fact that he could deny me anything at all, even what I didn't want.

Apesar de desejar muito todas as coisas que o dinheiro compra, havia uma corrente diabólica a desviar-me para outro caminho, para a anarquia, para a pobreza e para a doidice. Tinha aquela ilusão louca de que um homem pode levar uma vida decente sem se alugar como um Judas

Goddamnit, man, I tell you it’s fear of the sack! Tell them that this man Kemp is fleeing St. Louis because he suspects the sack is full of something ugly and he doesn’t want to be put in with it. He senses this from afar. This man Kemp is not a model youth. He grew up with two toilets and a football, but somewhere along the line he got warped. Now all he wants is Out, Flee. He doesn’t give a good shit for St. Louis or his friends or his family or anything else… he just wants to find some place where he can breathe… is that good enough for you?” “Well,

Then came noon, and morning withered like a lost dream. The sweat was torture and the rest of the day was littered with the dead remains of all those things that might have happened, but couldn't stand the heat. When the sun gets hot enough it burned away all the illusions and I saw the place as it was - cheap, sullen and garish - nothing good was going to happen here.

Невесть как они обретали уверенность, что, убравшись отсюда к черту, найдут что-то лучшее. Они слышали слово, то самое дьявольское слово, что заставляет людей впадать в противоречие с желанием двигаться дальше, – не все в мире живут в жестяных лачугах без туалетов, совсем без денег и без другой еды, кроме риса и бобов; не все убирают сахарный тростник за доллар в день или волокут в город кокосовые орехи, чтобы продавать их по десять центов, – но дешевый, жаркий, голодный мир их отцов и дедов, их братьев и сестер еще не конец истории, ибо если человек способен собраться с духом или даже совладать с отчаянием и отвалить на несколько тысяч миль, есть чертовски хорошая надежда, что у него будут деньги в кармане, кусок мяса в желудке и пропасть славно проведенного времени.

Considering the confusion of The Boom and the grab-bag morality that was driving it along, I felt for the first time in my life that I might get a chance to affect the course of things instead of merely observing them. I might even get rich; God knows, it seemed easy enough. I gave it a lot of thought, and though I was careful never to mention it, I began to see a new dimension in everything that happened.

Sala’s apartment on Calle Tetuan was about as homey as a cave, a dank grotto in the very bowels of the Old City. It was not an upscale neighborhood. Sanderson shunned it and Zimburger called it a sewer. It reminded me of a big handball court in some stench-ridden YMCA. The ceiling was twenty feet high not a breath of clean air, no furniture except two metal cots and an improvised picnic table, and since it was on the ground floor we could never open the windows because thieves would come in off the street and sack the place…We had no refrigerator and therefor no ice, so we drank hot rum out of dirty glasses and did our best to stay out of the place as much as possible…Night after night I would sit uselessly at Al’s, drinking myself into a stupor because I couldn’t stand the idea of going back to the apartment.

After one night too many sleeping on some stinking cot in a foul grotto where I didn't want to be anyway and had no reason to be except that it was foreign and cheap, I decided to hell with it. If that was absolute freedom then I'd had a bellyful of it, and from here on it I would try something a little less pure and one hell of a lot more comfortable. I was not only going to have an address, but I was going to have a car, and if there was anything else to be had in the way of large and stabilizing influences, I would have those too.

Happy,” I muttered, trying to pin the word down. But it is one of those words, like Love, that I have never quite understood. Most people who deal in words don’t have much faith in them and I am no exception—especially the big ones like Happy and Love and Honest and Strong. They are too elusive and far too relative when you compare them to sharp, mean little words like Punk and Cheap and Phony. I feel at home with these, because they’re scrawny and easy to pin, but the big ones are tough and it takes either a priest or a fool to use them with any confidence.

You’re the same way,” he said. “We’re all going to the same damn places, doing the same damn things people have been doing for fifty years, and we keep waiting for something to happen.” He looked up. “You know—I’m a rebel, I took off—now where’s my reward?” “You fool,” I said. “There is no reward and there never was.” “Jesus,” he said. “That’s horrible.” He raised the bottle to his lips and finished it off. “We’re just drunkards,” he said, “helpless drunkards. To hell with it—I’ll go back to some Godforsaken little town and be a fireman.

I felt the same pressure, a sense of time rushing by while it seemed to be standing still. Whenever I thought of time in Puerto Rico, I was reminded of those old magnetic clocks that hung on the walls of my classrooms in high school. Every now and then a hand would not move for several minutes—and if I watched it long enough, wondering if it had finally broken down, the sudden click of the hand jumping three or four notches would startle me when it came.