Elliott Chaze Quotes
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Because you can’t kiss your way out of prison and I knew that for sure. For dead sure.
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Primarily I have a simple desire to shine my ass — to show off a bit in print.
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After all, no matter how long you live, there aren't too many really delicious moments along the way, since most of life is spent eating and sleeping and waiting for something to happen that never does. You can figure it up for yourself, using your own life as the scoreboard. Most of living is waiting to live. And you spend a great deal of time worrying about things that don't matter and about people that don't matter and all this is clear to you when you know the very day you're going to die.
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In tennis the addict moves about a hard rectangle and seeks to ambush a fuzzy ball with a modified snow-shoe.
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Because I felt so different myself. As if I were charged with cool electricity that washed me down inside and out and at the same time scared me and relieved me. That’s fancy as hell, isn’t it? But it’s fancy because it’s so and not because I want to dress it up for you.
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If your life can hang from a chewing gum wrapper it can hang from anything in the book. It can hang from a bullet no bigger than a bean, or from a cigarette smoked in bed, or a bad breakfast that causes the doctor to sew the absorbent cotton inside you. From a slick tire tread or the hiccups or from kissing the wrong woman. Life is a rental proposition with no lease. For everybody, tall and short, muscles and fat, white and yellow, rich and poor. I know that now. And it is good to know at a time like this.
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When a rich man dies it is more complex than when a poor man dies. A rich man doesn't simply quit living. He quits being rich, too.
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Now that I was rich I worried a lot more than I had before .... Or let's say I didn't worry more, but that I worried harder, because all my life I'd wanted to live lazily and glossily, and now I had it and didn't want it taken away from me. Before I became rich it was only a matter of hanging onto life, a good, rugged, animalistic, instinctive thing that kept me hard and on my toes. This was different, this petulant, craven business of sweating over my wealth, and over what it was doing ...
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When a rich man dies it is more complex than when a poor man dies. A rich man doesn't simply quit living. He quits being rich, too. Of course a poor man quits being poor when he dies, but that is not a thing to lament.
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Most of living is waiting to live. And you spend a great deal of time worrying about things that don’t matter and about people that don’t matter and all this is clear to you when you know the very day you’re going to die.
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Out West all the smells are sucked up out of the baked land by the sun. And it’s as if all the colors in the ground are gobbled up by their sunsets, and so is the blue of the sky. The sky is high and pale and impersonal and you get the feeling it doesn’t belong to you at all, but that it is the property of the chamber of commerce. In the South the sky is humid and low and rich and it’s yours to smell and feel. In the West you’re only an observer. In the West someone sees a flower growing on a mountain and he writes a whole damned pamphlet about it.
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No one gets as tired as a tired tramp.
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The primary conception of tennis is to get the ball over the net and at the same time to keep it within bounds of the court; failing this, within the borders of the neighborhood.