Sag Harbor Quotes

As time went on, we learned to arm ourselves in our different ways. Some of us with real guns, some of us with more ephemeral weapons, an idea or improbable plan or some sort of formulation about how best to move through the world. An idea that will let us be. Protect us and keep us safe. But a weapon nonetheless.

The only time "early bloomer" has ever been applied to me is vis-a-vis my premature apprehension of the deep dread-of-existence thing. In all other cases, I plod and tromp along. My knuckles? Well dragged.

The I-Remember-Whensters lumbered in with their musty catalogues of the bygone, dragging IVs of distilled nostalgia behind them on creaky wheels,

in the slow motion that is the speed of humiliation.

Two people, two hands, and two songs, in this case "Big Shot" and "Bette Davis Eyes." The lyrics of the two songs provided no commentary, honest or ironic, on the proceedings. They were merely there and always underfoot, the insistent gray muck that was pop culture. It stuck to our shoes and we tracked it through our lives.

I was nostalgic for everything big and small. Nostalgic for what never happened and nostalgic about what will be, looking forward to looking back on a time when things got easier.

memory has a palette and broad brush.

Sitcom white folk, movie-of-the-week white folk were our coon show.

If the correct things belonged to you, perhaps you might belong.

I had a roll of non sequiturs in my pockets and I was just tossing them out across the water trying to get a good skip going.

It was where we mingled with who we had been and who we would be. Sharing space with our echoes out in the sun.

Sag Harbor, Cold Spring Harbor, Mystic, New Bedford, Nantucket, Cape Cod, Martha’s Vineyard.

Saturdays in Sag Harbor, I liked to lie in bed listening to the weekend rev itself up.

If I seem to be over-interested in junk, it is because I am, and I have a lot of it, too—half a garage full of bits and broken pieces. I use these things for repairing other things. Recently I stopped my car in front of the display yard of a junk dealer near Sag Harbor. As I was looking courteously at the stock, it suddenly occurred to me that I had more than he had. But it can be seen that I do have a genuine and almost miserly interest in worthless objects. My excuse is that in this era of planned obsolescence, when a thing breaks down I can usually find something in my collection to repair it—a toilet, or a motor, or a lawn mower. But I guess the truth is that I simply like junk.

I'm not quite sure what freedom is, but I damn know well what it ain't. How have we gotten so silly, I wonder. I get back off into Baldwin. I don't give a damn if Sag Harbor sags into oblivion. Me and James Baldwin are communicating. His fiction is more real than this reality.

it trains the kid in question to determine when people in the corner of his eye are talking about him and when they are not, a useful skill in later life when sorting out bona-fide persecution from perceived persecution, the this-is-actually-happening from the mere paranoid manifestation

Nada Barry, widow of Bob Barry, had first arrived in Sag Harbor to carry out some sociological research. One of her observations, even back then, was that the typical American porch culture, whereby a family would sit on the large veranda at the front of the house in the evenings and chat with every passer-by, had disappeared completely in Sag Harbor by the

The call from Victor took the icing off her cake.

Me...squinting in discomfort at the discovery of some new defect in the design of the world.

...we got sanded. In the towels, scalps, clumping on sweat along our limbs. It had begun, the gritification of the day.

With that, the argument ended, the latest meaningless border skirmish in the long war over what white culture was acceptable and what was not.

Dibs was dibs, we didn't have to call it. Ever since we were born, we'd lived according to the rough frontier justice of even Stephen, and even Stephen had a perfect memory.

The french-fry smell was almost another person in our room, stumbling around in the dark,

I thought, This is where the day curdles.

We were a made-for-TV family. Every new channel added to our lineup, every magnificent home-entertainment advance increased the possibility that we wouldn't have to talk to one another.

I was one of them on the dance floor and they were one of me. I jostled, was jostled in turn, collision as communication: I am here, we're here together. The bass bounced my shirt on my chest.

There is always so much talk and data on the Holocaust but very little if anything is known about the blacks who were also there and tortured and experimented on.” “Yes! The Rhineland Bastards, they were called.

According to the world, we were the definition of paradox: black boys with beach houses. A paradox to the outside, but it never occurred to us that there was anything strange about it. It was simply who we were.

A Sag Harbor ship visited his father’s bay, and Queequeg sought a passage to Christian lands. But the ship, having her full complement of seamen, spurned his suit; and not all the King his father’s influence could prevail. But Queequeg vowed a vow. Alone in his canoe, he paddled off to a distant strait, which he knew the ship must pass through when she quitted the island. On one side was a coral reef; on the other a low tongue of land, covered with mangrove thickets that grew out into the water. Hiding his canoe, still afloat, among these thickets, with its prow seaward, he sat down in the stern, paddle low in hand; and when the ship was gliding by, like a flash he darted out; gained her side; with one backward dash of his foot capsized and sank his canoe; climbed up the chains; and throwing himself at full length upon the deck, grappled a ring-bolt there, and swore not to let it go, though hacked in pieces.

Steinbeck set off from Sag Harbor on the morning of September 23, 1960, with Charley, his tall and gregarious French poodle, for company. “I remember when he asked to take Charley Dog,” his wife later recalled. “He said rather meekly, ‘This is a big favor I’m going to ask, Elaine. Can I take Charley?’ ‘What a good idea,’ I said, ‘if you get into any kind of trouble, Charley can go get help.’ John looked at me sternly and said, ‘Elaine, Charley isn’t Lassie.

Three months, I thought. In idle moments, I retreated into that early-summer dream of reinvention, when you set your eyes on September and that refurbished self you were going to tool around in, honking the horn so people would take notice...

All over the world the teenage millions searched for routes out of their dank, personal labyrinths. Signing up for that perfect extracurricular, rehearsing fake smiles before toothpaste-flecked mirrors, rummaging through their personalities to come up with laid-back greetings and clever put-downs to be saved for that special occasion. Lying sprawled on their beds, ankles crossed, while they overanalyzed the lyric sheet of the band that currently owned their soul, until the words became a philosophy.

Rap was a natural resource, might as well pay for sunlight or the very breeze or an early-morning car alarm going off. No, I spent my money on music for moping. Perfect for drifting off on the divan with a damp towel on your forehead, a minor-chord soundtrack as you moaned into reflecting pools about your elaborate miserableness. The singers were faint, androgynous ghosts, dragging their too-heavy chains across the plains of misery, the gloomy moors of discontent, in search of relief. Let's just put it out there: I liked the Smiths.

Some kids rebelled to get attention. I did stupid things very carefully, spending all of my time thinking of ways to engineer small stupid things without getting caught. Things so small that no one else could see them and only I knew about them. But there I was last night, being stupid in a group, and of course that broke my rules and look where it got me.

Sometimes he tried to get a basketball game together, two-on-two, but after a while we just started playing three against him, and he still won, leaving us a sorry sight at the side of the court, bent over and dizzy, palms on our knees and reaching for imaginary asthma inhalers. Imaginary asthma inhalers created a placebo effect, which was better than nothing.

A firefly blinked into existence, drew half a word in the air. Then gone. A black bug secret in the night. Such a strange little guy. It materialized, visible to human eyes for brief moments, and then it disappeared. But it got its name from its fake time, people time, when in fact most of its business went on when people couldn't see it. Its true life was invisible to us but we called it firefly after its fractions. Knowable and fixed for a few seconds, sharing a short segment of its message before it continued on its real mission, unknowable in its true self and course, outside of reach. It was a bad name because it was incomplete—both parts were true, the bright and the dark, the one we could see and the other one we couldn't. It was both. I

Sometimes when you had your head down in the [ice cream] vats, time stopped. The swirling white mist stalled in the air, hanging like ribbons. All sound dropped out, the whirring of the blender and the radio, and even the static-y buzz of your own thoughts. I don't know where I went during these spells. They only lasted a few moments yet they contained a little scoop of the infinite, a waffle-perfumed eternity.

Bulletin from Johnny Cake Hill, the editors attributed the specious charge not to New Bedford whalemen but to “Sag Harbor boys.” The boys were advised to “straighten it out amongst themselves.

People who don’t know our military very well sometimes seem amazed whenever men like Jordan Haerter and Jonathan Yale make the headlines. On April 22, 2008, those two enlisted Marines were standing watch at a checkpoint outside a joint U.S.-Iraqi barracks in Ramadi when a large truck began accelerating toward their position. Their checkpoint controlled entry to a barracks in the Sufiyah district that housed fifty Marines from the newly arrived First Battalion, Ninth Regiment. They were alert to the VBIED threat and quickly and accurately assessed the situation before them—all the more impressive given that the level of violence in the city generally wasn’t what it had been a few years earlier. Both Marines opened fire immediately, Haerter with an M4 and Yale with a machine gun. Still the truck rushed toward them. Nearby, dozens of Iraqi police fired on the truck as well—but only briefly before their instincts for survival kicked in. Expecting a huge blast, they fled the area. But those two Marines stood their ground, pouring fire into the truck until it coasted to a halt in front of them—and exploded. Later estimates pegged the size of that IED at two thousand pounds or more. The blast damaged or destroyed two dozen houses and knocked down the walls of a mosque a hundred yards away. An Iraqi who witnessed the attack, interviewed by a Marine general afterward, choked back a sob and said, “Sir, in the name of God, no sane man would have stood there and done what they did. No sane man. They saved us all.” Lieutenant General John F. Kelly, who investigated the incident to document the Navy Crosses they were to receive, said, “In all of the instantaneous violence Yale and Haerter never hesitated. By all reports and by the recording [of a security camera nearby], they never stepped back. They never even started to step aside. They never even shifted their weight. With their feet spread shoulder-width apart, they leaned into the danger, firing as fast as they could work their weapons.” Yale, from Burkeville, Virginia, and Haerter, from Sag Harbor, New York, were decorated in 2009 for their steady nerves and heroism in the last six seconds of their lives, saving at least fifty people living

Tiwa Savage,

fill your life with purpose. You always have goals, and you surround yourself with the best people.

COSMOPOLITANS AT THE PARADISE Cosmopolitans at the Paradise. Heavenly Kelly's cosmopolitans make the sun rise. They make the sun rise in my blood. Under the stars in my brow. Tonight a perfect cosmopolitan sets sail for paradise. Johnny's cosmopolitans start the countdown on the launch pad. My Paradise is a diner. Nothing could be finer. There was a lovely man in this town named Harry Diner. Lighter than zero Gravity, a rinse of lift, the cosmopolitan cocktail They mix here at the Paradise is the best In the United States - pink as a flamingo and life-announcing As a leaping salmon. The space suit I will squeeze into arrives In a martini glass. Poured from a chilled silver shaker beaded with frost sweat. Finally I go Back to where the only place to go is far. Ahab on the launch pad - I'm the roar Wearing a wild blazer, black stripes and red, And a yarmulke with a propeller on my missile head. There she blows! Row harder, my hearties! - My United Nations of liftoff! I targeted the great white whale black hole. On impact I burst into stars. I am the caliph of paradise, Hip-deep in a waterbed of wives. I am the Ducati of desire, 144.1 horsepower at the rear wheel. Nights and days, black stripes and red, I orbit Sag Harbor and the big blue ball. I pursue Moby-Dick to the end of the book. I raise the pink flamingos to my lips and drink.

Hillary mingled with old friends in Sag Harbor under a tent on the night of August 30: Calvin Klein, Harvey Weinstein, Jimmy Buffett, Jon Bon Jovi, and Sir Paul McCartney. Buffett and his wife, Jane, were the hosts of this extravaganza, which capped a multiday fund-raising blitz through the Hamptons. For a minimum of $100,000, VIPs were treated to dinner, “premium seating,” and the option to dance the night away with Hillary, Bill, and a few of their A-list pals. Hillary put on a brave face, reveled with her donors, and even joined in singing “Hey Jude.” But, below the surface, she was tense. Her closest aide’s personal life was blowing up in a fashion so spectacular that the campaign was at risk of becoming collateral damage.

A house in Sag Harbor.” Just the words Sag Harbor conjured up images of the kind of life she had never known. Sand dunes and waves; sea grass and farmers’ markets; rich women with their sun-kissed faces stretched tight like rubber bands.

What did she say? Was she ready to leave behind a world-class, potentially lucrative life? And settle for regular hobnobbing on a lower level?

my junior-high schemes of social improvement. I was one of those dullards who thought that “Just be yourself” was the wisdom of the ages, the most calming piece of advice I had ever heard, and acted accordingly. It enabled these words, for example, to escape my mouth: “I can't wait for Master of Horror George A. Romero to make another film. Fangoria magazine—still the best horror and sci-fi magazine around if you ask me—says he has trouble raising funding, but I think Hollywood is just scared of what he has to say.” And also: “It seems like we—all of us—made a mistake by switching over to Advanced D&D. The Basic game was … purer, you know?” Statements (of simple truth!) that had been harmless weeks ago were now symptoms of disease. And possibly catching. I was just being myself, and I was just being avoided. For

He was our best liar, a raconteur of baroque teenage shenanigans. Everything in his field of vision reminded him of some escapade he needed to share, or directed him to some escapade about to begin,

We were made to think of ourselves as odd birds, right? According to the world, we were the definition of paradox: black boys with beach houses. A paradox to the outside, but it never occurred to us that there was anything strange about it. It was simply who we were.

You were hard or else you were soft, in the slang drawn from the territory of manhood, the state of your erected self. Word on the Street was that we were soft, with our private-school uniforms, in our cozy beach communities, so we learned to walk like hard rocks, like B-boys, the unimpeachably down. Even if we knew better. We heard the voices of the constant damning chorus that told us we lived false, and we decided to be otherwise. We talked one way in school, one way in our homes, and another way to each other. We got guns. We got guns for a few days one summer and then got rid of them. Later some of us got real guns.

Some kids rebelled to get attention. I did stupid things very carefully, spending all of my time thinking of ways to engineer small stupid things without getting caught. Things so small that no one else could see them and only I knew about them.

For all his fear that people were watching all the time, that people will talk about you unless you're vigilant about what they see, no one was watching at all. No one cares about what goes on in other people's houses. The grubby dramas. It was just us. The soundstage was empty, the production lot scheduled for demolition. They'd turned off the electricity long ago. We delivered our lines in the darkness.

The tonic water hissed as the pressure in the bottle fizzed away. The bottle made a slight ting as it slid into the rack in the fridge door, next to the relish and mustard. I was well acquainted with all these sounds and heard the other silent things. This made no sound: my father stirring his drink with his finger. This also made no sound: that dreaded calculation, how many is that today? Certainly this made no sound: the understanding, I'm pushing my luck by hanging around here. And silent now but soon to make itself heard, the chemical reaction in his brain that said, Let's get this hate in gear.