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The Crazyladies of Pearl Street QUOTES

The Crazyladies of Pearl Street QUOTES

1 " The Trevanian Buff is a strange and wonderful creature: an outsider, a natural elitist, not so much a cynic as an idealist mugged by reality, not just one of those who march to a different drummer, but the solo drummer in a parade of one. "

― Trevanian , The Crazyladies of Pearl Street

2 " Of course these gifts were reckless extravagances for a family that was never more than a couple of dollars and a few days away from hunger, but that’s how poor people cope with being marooned in poverty while all around them flows the frothy stream of the consumer culture. "

― Trevanian , The Crazyladies of Pearl Street

3 " When I hear middle-class people complain about the poor buying luxuries for their kids when they don’t even have enough for groceries, I remember the lavish Christmases my mother gave us, even at the risk of breaking up the family. Prudence is a bourgeois virtue, because the rich have something worth saving. The poor splurge because they need desperately to make a colorful splash across the drab fabric of their lives. The hungry don’t dream of brown rice and vegetables; they dream of cake. "

― Trevanian , The Crazyladies of Pearl Street

4 " the first batch of ads just after the couple broke up, and the second just before they got together again...two moments that the sponsors considered so suspenseful that the listener wouldn’t be able to step away from the radio for fear of missing the resolution. "

― Trevanian , The Crazyladies of Pearl Street

5 " The effect of this was to make me abjure hackneyed expressions from an early age, so I suppose I benefited from my mother’s phrasal insouciance in the long run, although it’s possible that my automatic eschewal of clichés occasionally drove me from the Scylla of ridicule into the turbid Charybdisian eddies of sesquipedalian obfuscation...though I trust not. "

― Trevanian , The Crazyladies of Pearl Street

6 " and it was a given of the Western genre, both on the radio and in the movies (it’s interesting that one was ‘on’ the radio but ‘in’ the movies) "

― Trevanian , The Crazyladies of Pearl Street

7 " Mother used to shape and score the Spam, arrange the rings of pineapple, then pour a little maple syrup over it and bake it so that it came out looking almost exactly like a miniature glazed ham, and we used to have it with yams on which we melted margarine. "

― Trevanian , The Crazyladies of Pearl Street

8 " my job to color the margarine, putting the white, lard-like block into a bowl then sprinkling orange coloring powder over it and mixing with a fork until it was more brazenly yellow than any butter would dare to be. "

― Trevanian , The Crazyladies of Pearl Street

9 " intentioned myth. "

― Trevanian , The Crazyladies of Pearl Street

10 " basso ostinado "

― Trevanian , The Crazyladies of Pearl Street

11 " Prudence is a bourgeois virtue, because the rich have something worth saving. The poor splurge because they need desperately to make a colorful splash across the drab fabric of their lives. The hungry don’t dream of brown rice and vegetables; they dream of cake. "

― Trevanian , The Crazyladies of Pearl Street

12 " She often said, and honestly believed, that she was not prejudiced—well, except in the case of Italian mobsters and drunken Irish loafers and stupid Poles and snooty Yankee Protestants, but then who wasn’t? "

― Trevanian , The Crazyladies of Pearl Street