Ben Fountain, Billy Lynn's Long Halftime Walk
15 quotes
"You can deny him, he thought, watching his father across the table. You can hate him, love him, pity him, never speak to or look at him in the eye again, never deign even to be in his crabbed and bitter presence, but you're still stuck with the son of a bitch. One way or another he'll always be your daddy, not even all-powerful death was going to change that."
"Why?' He kept asking in his sweetly belling voice, its tone as pure as marbles swirled around a crystal pail. Why him wun up the tree? Why him nest up theah? Why him gadder nuts? Why? Why? Why? And Billy answering every question to the best of his ability, as if anything less would disrespect the deep and maybe even divine force that drove his little nephew toward universal knowledge."
"As if sorrow is the true reality? Without ever putting his mind to it, he's come to believe that loss is the standard trajectory."
"There was no such thing as perfection in this world, only moments of such extreme transparency that you forgot yourself, a holy mercy if there ever was one."
"It is sort of weird being honored for the worst day of your life."
"It has been a frustrating game thus far and [the natives] blow off steam by spending money. Happily there is retail at every turn so the crow doesn’t lack for buying opportunities, and it’s the same everywhere Bravo has been, the airports, the hotels, the arenas and convention centers, in the downtowns and the suburbs alike, retail dominates the land. Somewhere along the way America became a giant mall with a country attached."
"America loves to pray, God knows. America prays and prays and prays, it is the land of unchained prayer, and all this ceremonial praying is hard on Billy."
"No it was my choice. It's what I wanted to do. And I knew they'd probably send me to Iraq. It's not like anybody lied to me."She groans. "Billy, all these mofos ever do is lie. You think if they halfway told the truth we'd even be in a fucking war? You know what I think, I think we don't deserve to have you guys die for us. No country that lets It's leaders lie like that deserves a single soldier to die for it."
"Americans are children who must go somewhere else to grow up, and sometimes die."
"At the door to the locker room Dime asks [Ennis] to autograph his ball. Ennis rears back. He's chuckling but his eyes are wary. 'Why you want that? I'm just an old equipment hand, nobody cares about my autograph.''As far as I'm concerned you run the team,' Dime answers, so Ennis laughs and takes the Sharpie and signs his name to Dime's ball, and this will be the only autograph that Dime collects today."
"He decides he wants both more or less. He’d like to hang with Beyonce in a nice way, get to know her by doing small pleasant things together like playing board games and going out for ice cream, or how about this, a three-week trial run in some tropical paradise where they can hang together in that nice way and possibly fall in love, and meanwhile fuck each other’s brains out in their spare time. He wants both, he wants the entire body-soul connect because anything less is just demeaning."
"I like to kill my enemies and listen to the lamentations of their women"
"If you could figure out how to live with family then you'd gone a long way toward finding your peace."
"You'd think family would be the one sure thing in life, the gimme? Points you got just for being born? So much thick, meaty stuff bound you to these people, so many interlocking spirals of history, genetics, common cause, and struggle that it should be the most basic of all drives, that you would strive to protect and love one another, yet this bond that should be the big no-brainer was in fact the hardest thing."
"Not that she means anything by it, he knows. This is simply her lifelong habit of moderation at work, her need to tamp everything down to the routine, the modest, the tepid everyday. He understands the whole concept of boundaries, but there’s a point where this mania for normalizing turns toxic."