Patrick DeWitt Quotes

We can all of us be hurt, and no one is exclusively safe from worry and sadness.

Luck was something you either earned or invented through strength of character. You had to come by it honestly; you could not trick or bluff your way into it.

The creak of bed springs suffering under the weight of a restless man is as lonely a sound as I know.

I lay in the dark thinking about the difficulties of family, how crazy and crooked the stories of a bloodline can be.

Come with me into the world and reclaim your independence. You stand to gain so much, and riches are the least of it.

He is not bad, I don't think. Perhaps he is simply too lazy to be good.

I do not know what it was about that boy but just looking at him, even I wanted to clout him on the head. It was a head that invited violence.

Our blood is the same, we just use it differently.

Work will drive you crazy if you let it.

I sighed. ‘It doesn’t matter what we do. Money comes and goes.’ I shook my head. ‘It doesn’t matter and you know it doesn’t.

Hurried business is bad business.

...I am happy to welcome you to a town peopled in morons exclusively. Furthermore, I hope that your transformation to moron is not an unpleasant experience.

Where is your mother, Charlie asked. Dead. I’m sorry to hear that Thank you. But she was always dead.

...things I had come to find humor in would make your honest man swoon.

He only wished to fight and cultivate an anger toward me, thus alleviating his guilt, but I would not abet him in this.

Why were you feeling low? Why does anyone? It creeps up on you from time to time.

Do you know how much a hundred dollars is?' he asked. I said that I did not and he answered, 'It is a hundred dollars.

Here is another miserable mental image I will have to catalog and make room for.

I will admit he is unusual, but that is perhaps the closest I could come to complimenting him.

I will never be a leader of men, and neither do I want to be one, and neither do I want to be led. I thought: I want to lead only myself.

It is true, I thought. I am living a life.

I thought, When a man is properly drunk it is as though he is an a room by himself--there is a physical, impenetrable separation between him and his fellows.

All you will get from me is death.

I saw my bulky person in the windows of the passing storefronts and wondered, when will that man there find himself to be loved?

It is hard to find a friend,' I said. 'It is the hardest thing in this world,' he agreed.

...but I could not sleep without proper covering and spent the rest of the night rewriting lost arguments from my past, altering history so that I emerged victorious.

You put a wage behind something, it gives the act a sort of respectability.

There is nothing typical about my profession.’ Suddenly I did not want to talk about it any longer. ‘I don’t want to talk about it any longer.

Some wear greed as a fine suit of clothes. But you, my son, bear its stamp ever more poorly.

Whenever we changed schools, we had to make a new set of friends. At the time, of course, I hated it. But looking back now, I'm really glad I did, because it forces independence on you.