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The Cold Millions QUOTES

The Cold Millions QUOTES

1 " How do you do it?” I asked her. “How do you keep getting up every day and fighting when winning seems impossible?” She thought about it, and then she said, “Men sometimes say to me: You might win the battle, Gurley, but you’ll never win the war. But no one wins the war, Ryan. Not really. I mean, we’re all going to die, right? “But to win a battle now and then? What more could you want? "

― Jess Walter , The Cold Millions

2 " Hell, it took only your first day in a Montana flop or standing over your mother's unmarked grave to know that equal was the one thing all men were not. A few lived like kings, and the rest hugged the dirt until it cracked open and took them home. "

― Jess Walter , The Cold Millions

3 " Rye wondered if loving another person was a trap—that eventually you had to either lose them or lose yourself. "

― Jess Walter , The Cold Millions

4 " He flushed with sadness, as if every moment of his life were occurring all at once—his sister dying in childbirth, his mother squirming in that one-room flop, poor Danny sliding between wet logs, Gig in jail, and Jules dead—and how many more? All people, except this rich cream, living and scraping and fighting and dying, and for what, nothing, the cold millions with no chance in this world. "

― Jess Walter , The Cold Millions

5 " I think he came to believe it was better to choose your life, and that even choosing your death was better than letting someone else choose your life. "

― Jess Walter , The Cold Millions

6 " At my age, you don’t cry for the loss of old friends. You make a noise, “Ah,” that is an expression of sorrow, but also of contentment that your friend lived a good life. It is, I suppose, the sound, too, of loneliness—here is yet another person I will never see again. "

― Jess Walter , The Cold Millions

7 " With all due respect, sir,” she said, “I do not believe justice will ever be truly possible, economic or otherwise, for any human being, until we have once and for all emancipated the vagina. "

― Jess Walter , The Cold Millions

8 " Books that hadn’t been cracked since they were shelved. Give money to a monkey and he’ll fill his cage with bananas. Give the same money to a dim American and he’ll build a show library every time. "

― Jess Walter , The Cold Millions

9 " cruelty and hope should never be served together. "

― Jess Walter , The Cold Millions

10 " Elena reminds him that without his dad’s union job, he wouldn’t have had a roof over his head, but he’s one of those men of fragile confidence who needs to always believe that he’s made his own way in the world. "

― Jess Walter , The Cold Millions

11 " Maybe it’s being close to the end, but I have this desire to pull Greg aside—to pull all my children aside, and my grandchildren—and to whisper something profound, to pass on the great wisdom I’ve acquired. Something that would open their hearts and create in them an unassailable courage, a generosity of spirit, faith in humanity. "

― Jess Walter , The Cold Millions

12 " People expect a story to always mean the same thing, but I have found that stories change like people do. "

― Jess Walter , The Cold Millions

13 " form "

― Jess Walter , The Cold Millions

14 " fell in love with my country—its rivers, prairies, forests, mountains, cities and people. . . . It could be a paradise on earth if it belonged to the people, not to a small owning class. —Elizabeth Gurley Flynn "

― Jess Walter , The Cold Millions

15 " But the only thing I can think of is Time and patience. "

― Jess Walter , The Cold Millions

16 " As Albert Camus once said, “Fiction is the lie through which we tell the truth.” And as Jessamyn West said, “Fiction reveals the truth that reality obscures.” And as my kids said, “Dad, that sounds made up. "

― Jess Walter , The Cold Millions

17 " It’s quite a thing when the world is upside down to hear someone say it don’t have to be—that a man could be paid enough to feed and house himself. "

― Jess Walter , The Cold Millions

18 " ...I slipped the porter a buck for a whiskey, then another when the train slowed the last five miles, forest, foothills, farms, and finally, Spokane.
I couldn't believe how the syphilitic town had metastasized. Smoke seeped from twenty thousand chimneys, pillars to an endless gray ceiling. The city was twice the size of the last time I'd hated being there. A box of misery spilled over the whole river valley. "

― Jess Walter , The Cold Millions

19 " Too far, Mrs. Jones! You go too far! You go too far confusing the cause of labor with that of socialism "

― Jess Walter , The Cold Millions

20 " Taft himself had visited as secretary of war in ’07, before becoming president. He called the camps a “sewer of sin” and “a sore on an otherwise beautiful national forest.” In response, the Montana side gleefully voted to take his name. "

― Jess Walter , The Cold Millions