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The Paperboy QUOTES

The Paperboy QUOTES

1 " ...he told a story about the days when he was a reporter himself and how he had gotten so close to story that he finally couldn't write it...When I stared at something long enough, the lines blurred and I could no longer see it for what it was. One thing became another. "

― Pete Dexter , The Paperboy

2 " I was tired in ways that had nothing to do with sleep. It occurred to me, sitting in the car with her, that I had been trying to hold too many things together that were meant to fall apart. "

― Pete Dexter , The Paperboy

3 " Nothing looks more foolish than tradition to those who have none. "

― Pete Dexter , The Paperboy

4 " Sometimes," he said, "you've got to watch people a long time to see who they are. "

― Pete Dexter , The Paperboy

5 " To see certain things, you have to be lying on your back with tears in your eyes and a scalding potato in your mouth. It's possible, I think, that you have to be hurt to see anything at all. "

― Pete Dexter , The Paperboy

6 " I had noticed, even then, that there were certain women whom other women instinctively disliked, and that these women invariably had more bait in the water than the women who disliked them. "

― Pete Dexter , The Paperboy

7 " A newspaper story, like anything else, is more attractive from a distance, when it first comes to you, than it is when you get in close and agonize over the details. Which I presume is how Yardley got in the habit of keeping himself at a distance. "

― Pete Dexter , The Paperboy

8 " ...fill the holes with facts, not flowers. "

― Pete Dexter , The Paperboy

9 " He was a newspaperman,' he said, 'but there's some people who should never leave Savannah. "

― Pete Dexter , The Paperboy

10 " No one mentions that now, and I suppose no one is inclined to bring it up, particularly not my father, who in other matters loves those things most that he can no longer touch or see, things washed clean of flaws and ambiguity by the years he has held them in his memory, reshaping them as he brings them out, again and again, telling his stories until finally the stories, and the things in them, are as perfect and sharp as the edge of the knife he keeps in his pocket. "

― Pete Dexter , The Paperboy

11 " ...without moving a muscle in his face, slips away; retreats, I think, to that sheltered place where his stories are kept. Perhaps we all have our places. "

― Pete Dexter , The Paperboy

12 " Cautious human beings do not presume to write history on a day's notice. They are aware of the damage mistakes can cause. My father believed that mistakes could always be corrected in the next edition. "

― Pete Dexter , The Paperboy