This Boy's Life Quotes Flashcards
Fearlessness in those without power is
maddening to those who have it.”
Happiness is endless hapiness, innocent of its own sure passing.
Pain is endless pain.”
Want! You must want something.
What do you want?”
“And I learned that it’s a bad idea to curse if you’re in trouble,
but a good idea to sing, if you can.”
I was caught up in my mother’s freedom,
her delight in her freedom, her dream of transformation.”
“I didn’t come to Utah to be the same boy I’d been before.
I had my own dreams of transformation…”
“All the images of myself as I wished
to be were images of myself armed.”
“It was the kind of room that B-movie detectives wake up in,
bound and gagged after they’ve been slipped a Mickey.”
“The effect on them would have been careless,
just one of style, and I took note of it.”
“The words came as easily as if someone were
breathing them into my ear.”
“I imagined being adopted by
different people I saw on the street.”
“He would hold no grudges as long as
my mother walked the line”
“I was tempted by the idea of belonging to a conventional family, and living in a house,
and having a big brother and a couple of sisters—especially if one of those sisters was Norma.”
He smiled at me and put his hand on my shoulder and made frequent references to
fun things we’d done together. And I played along.”
“I was my mother’s son.
I could not be anybody else’s.”
“I hear his voice in my own when I
speak to my children in anger.”
I thought she was pathetic
and so did she.”
“His family had always been Jews,
but I had to wait ten years before learning this.”
“My mother didn’t tell me what went on between her and Roy,
the threats and occasional brutality with which he held her in place.
“I nodded and presented her with an
expression that was meant to register dawning comprehension.”
“I did an imitation of somebody
receiving divine reassurance and inspiration.”
“I burned the envelope and note in the sink
and washed the ashes down the drain.”
“Those words still sound to me less like a hope than an epitaph,
the last lie we tell before hurling ourselves over the brink.”
“I did not want to break cover,
but I had no choice.”
“‘My father left them to me,” I said.
‘After he died.’”
“I was subject to fits of feeling unworthy,
somehow deeply at fault.”
“I was a thief. By my own estimation,
a master thief.”
Even more than his anger,
his righteousness scared me to the point where my stomach cramped up.”
“In the past, I had been ready, even when innocent, to believe any evil thing of myself.
Now that I had grounds for guilt, I could no longer feel it.”
One night he kissed me, or I kissed him, or we kissed each other. It surprised us both.
After that, whenever we felt particularly close, we turned on each other.”
“I knew that Mr. Bolger would see through me
and be disgusted.”
I didn’t need to see the tears in Mr. Welch’s
eyes to know that I had brought shame on myself.”
I sometimes had to bite my lip to keep
from laughing in the ecstasy of my power over them.”
She needed me and to be
needed made me feel capable.
I sat where I was, both hands on the dashboard.
We were all over the road.”
I was also a thief. Dwight’s reason for calling me one was trivial,
based on my having taken his hunting knife without permission. My thefts were real.”
I wanted to confound these sharpies,
show them I wasn’t as dumb as they thought I was.”
From behind my wound,
I said things to Dwight that I never would have said before.”
I stood in the darkness on the other side, silently hugging
the rifle, sweating and shaking as in a fever.”
He had escaped Tina Flood,
he had escaped prison, and before long he would escape me.”
I wanted to call myself Jack, after Jack London.
believed that having his name would charge me with some of the strength and competence inherent of my idea of him.”
The rest of us carried on. We did so in a resolutely innocent way,
without ever admitting to ourselves what the real object was: that is, to bring somebody down.”
“I thought Roy was
what a man should be.”
I needed that rifle, for itself
and for the way it completed me when I held it.”
We should have looked cool,
but we didn’t
He was grinning. He crossed the room and sat on Skipper’s bed.
Still grinning, he said, “Who won?
Dwight was in his glory.
He cleared the utility room for action and put me back in training.”
I felt a surge of pride and connection;
connection not to him but to Dwight.”
There was a dash of swagger to his pose, something of the stage cavalier
but his smile was friendly and hopeful.”
I saw the time was right to
make a play for souvenirs.
the ecstasy at my
power over them.
the absurd and innocent
belief that they were safe
I had to
shoot
The silence made me uncomfortable
and in my discomfort I smiled at Silver
‘She was gasping as if someone had held her underwater.’
‘I rocked her and murmured to her. I was practiced at this
But Daddy left some marks on her. One of them was a strange docility
almost paralysis with men of a tyrant breed.
His clothes were wrong.
I didn’t know why they were but they were
I knew my mother would never let herself get
tangled up in a mess like that.
But first, she wanted my approval. I thought I had no choice,
so I gave it.’
I had fallen in
with some notorious older boys
I only wanted
what I couldn’t have
