William Kennedy Quotes

• “Love, is always insufficient, always a lie. Love, you are the clean shit of my soul. Stupid love, silly love.”

  William Kennedy

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• “Well-lit streets discourage sin, but don't overdo it.”

  William Kennedy

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• “. . . and what if I did drink too much? Whose business is that? Who knows how much I didn't drink?”

  William Kennedy

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• “Roscoe was spiritually illegal, a bootlegger of the soul, a mythic creature made of words and wit and wild deeds and boundless memory.”

  William Kennedy

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• “...the only brotherhood they belonged to was the one that asked that enduring question: How do I get through the next twenty minutes? They feared drys, cops, jailers, bosses, moralists, crazies, truth-tellers, and one another. they loved storytellers, liars, whores, fighters, singers, collie dogs that wagged their tails, and generous bandits. Rudy, thought Francis: he's just a bum, but who ain't?”

  William Kennedy

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• “They were both questing for the behavior that was proper to their station and their unutterable dreams. They both knew intimately the etiquette, the taboos, the protocol of bums. By their talk to each other they understood that they shared a belief in the brotherhood of the desolate; yet in the scars of their eyes they confirmed that no such fraternity had ever existed, that the only brotherhood they belonged to was the one that asked the enduring question: How do I get through the next twenty minutes? They feared drys, cops, jailers, bosses, moralists, crazies, truth-tellers, and one another. They loved storytellers, liars, whores, fighters, singers, collie dogs that wagged their tails, and generous bandits. Rudy, thought Francis, he’s just a bum, but who ain’t?”

  William Kennedy

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• “But after awhile you stand up, wipe the frost out of your ear, go someplace to get warm, bum a nickel for coffee, and then start walkin' toward somewheres else that ain't near no bridge.”

  William Kennedy

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• “Why was it that suicide kept rising up in Francis' mind? Wake up in the weeds outside Pittsburgh, half frozen over, too cold to move, flaked out 'n' stiffer than a chunk of old iron, and you say to yourself: Francis, you don't ever want to put in another night, another mornin', like this one was. Time to go take a header off the bridge.
  But after a while you stand up, wipe the frost out of your ear, go someplace to get warm, bum a nickel for coffee, and then start walkin' toward somewheres else that ain't near no bridge.”

  William Kennedy

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• “Let us, then, be up and doing, with a heart for any fate.”

  William Kennedy

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• “But fear is a cheap emotion, however full of wisdom. And, emotionally speaking, I've always thought of myself as a man of expensive taste.”

  William Kennedy

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• “It's quite uncanny what one sets in motion by being oneself.”

  William Kennedy

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• “Do something new and you are new. How boring it is not to fire machine guns.”

  William Kennedy

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• “Billy's native arrogance might well have been a gift of miffed genes, then come to splendid definition through the tests to which a street like Broadway puts a young man on the make: tests designed to refine a breed, enforce a code, exclude all simps and gumps, and deliver into the city's life a man worthy of functioning in this age of nocturnal supremacy. Men like Billy Phelan, forged in the brass of Broadway, send, in the time of their splendor, telegraphic statements of mission: I, you bums, am a winner. And that message, however devoid of Christ-like other-cheekery, dooms the faint-hearted Scottys of the night, who must sludge along, never knowing how it feels to spill over with the small change of sassiness, how it feels to leave the spillover on the floor, more where that came from, pal. Leave it for the sweeper.”

  William Kennedy

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• “One never knows the potential within the human breast.”

  William Kennedy

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• “We are only possible as what happened to us yesterday. We all change as well move”

  William Kennedy

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• “Katie bar the door.”

  William Kennedy

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• “I liked all their lies best, for I think they are the brightest part of anybody's history.”

  William Kennedy

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• “Gerald, through an act of silent will, imposed on his father the pressing obligation to perform his final acts of expiation for abandoning the family. You will not know, the child silently said, what these acts are until you have performed them all. And after you have performed them you will not understand that they were expiatory any more than you have understood all the other expiation that has kept you in such prolonged humiliation. Then, when these final acts are complete, you will stop trying to die because of me.”

  William Kennedy

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• “Only a bet on the impossible makes sense. It is an act of faith and courage requiring an irrational leap over reason. A man wins simply by making such a bet.”

  William Kennedy

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• “In the years after the death of Petrus, Hillegond had refused all offers of marriage, certain that her knowledge of men, despite her uncountable intimate encounters with them, was seriously bescrewed. Further, she grew certain from a recurring nightmare that should she ever consider a man as a second spouse, he would strangle her in her bed with a ligature.”

  William Kennedy

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• “He would not chance arrest by crawling into a corner of one of the old houses on Lower Broadway where the cops swept through periodically with their mindless net. What difference did it make whether four or six or eight lost men slept under a roof and out of the wind in a house with broken stairs and holes in the floors you could fall through to death, a house that for five or maybe ten years had been inhabited only by pigeons? What difference?”

  William Kennedy

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• “Why the hell's he preachin' if he don't preach to people that need it?”

  William Kennedy

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• “He lifted the picture for a closer look and saw himself among a group of men, tossing a baseball from bare right hand to gloved left hand. The flight of the ball had always made this photo mysterious to Francis, for the camera had caught the ball clutched in one hand and also in flight, arcing in a blur toward the glove. What the camera had caught was two instants in one: time separated and unified, the ball in two places at once, an eventuation as inexplicable as the Trinity itself. Francis now took the picture to be a Trinitarian talisman (a hand, a glove, a ball) for achieving the impossible: for he had always believed it impossible for him, ravaged man, failed human, to reenter history under this roof. Yet here he was in this acne of reconstitutable time, touching untouchable artifacts of a self that did not yet know it was ruined, just as the ball, in its inanimate ignorance, did not know yet that it was going nowhere, was caught.
  But the ball is really not yet caught, except by the camera, which has frozen only its situation in space.
  And Francis is not yet ruined, except as an apparency in process.
  The ball still flies.
  Francis still lives to play another day.
  Doesn't he?”

  William Kennedy

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• “Mi culpa es todo lo que me queda. Si la pierdo, no habré significado nada, no habré hecho nada, no habré sido nada.”

  William Kennedy

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• “Oye, todo es verdad — replicó Francis —. Todo cuanto te pasa por la imaginación, aunque apeste a chorrada, es verdad.”

  William Kennedy

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