Caleb Crain Quotes

#1. It's very strange to be completely naked in public," said Jacob. "It isn't something Americans ordinarily do."
"I can't say it's very English, either," replied Henry.
"It's a Scottish thing, though, isn't it? With all the kilts and all that.

Caleb Crain

#2. It sounds disgusting, in my opinion, 'stuffing,'" she continued. "I'd never heard of it before Rafe told me. To put your fingers inside a raw bird. It's the sort of thing they did on the frontier, isn't it.

Caleb Crain

#3. They came for the freedom, they stayed for the McNuggets.

Caleb Crain

#4. - Is it pleasing to you? Milo asked.
- It's excellent. We have to come back.
- But we are here now.

Caleb Crain

#5. By its nature a relationship was not an accomplishment. It was just a connection that happened to exist, for as long as it did exist.

Caleb Crain

#6. It's a question of wanting to know how the story turns out. And one can only know that about one story, ever.

Caleb Crain

#7. Jacob opened the refrigerator and stared into it vacantly, with the false purposefulness that lingers for a few moments when a person of a solitary nature is released from the company of a strong personality.

Caleb Crain

#8. The worse one sins, the more of a moralist one becomes.

Caleb Crain

#9. They're ruining the city, aren't they," remarked Rafe. "The backpackers.

Caleb Crain

#10. They're very keen on disillusioning young women at British universities, you know, I suppose to make us resigned and grateful later on.

Caleb Crain

#11. Overhead lights flickered on and off.
"It is closing soon," Markus explained.
"Now is what I call tiger time. The great beasts pad about, eyeing one another, trying to make up their minds at last.

Caleb Crain

#12. It is perhaps necessary for something dear to be lost."
"Why?"
"Perhaps it is necessary to the making of a story. A story after all is a way of remembering love.

Caleb Crain

#13. I suppose it does come with a certain responsibility."
"What does?" asked Annie.
"The magnificence of my person."
"Gah.

Caleb Crain

#14. Later, holding Milo's hand in the dark, Jacob felt that it was only in recovering it that he learned what he had been in danger of losing. The touch of Milo's hand seemed to remind him of parts of himself that he had already begun to forget about.

Caleb Crain

#15. Because the air was bright and fresh, the ground beneath them empty, and both of them young, it was possible to imagine that either of them could become anything he wanted.

Caleb Crain

#16. Everyday life continues during a love affair.

Caleb Crain

#17. The beer was cheap, the fiddling sharp, and the dancing sweaty.

Caleb Crain

#18. Everyone likes to say they're tolerant.

Caleb Crain

#19. A suicide makes a fault in a novel, as suicides make a fault in life.

Caleb Crain

#20. It was strange that one couldn't know in advance which places one was later going to wish to remember.

Caleb Crain

#21. I just remembered. My hamster is loose."
"Is that a thing to say to a nice girl?

Caleb Crain

#22. There's always a story that people are telling about themselves, and sometimes you can get them to tell it ever so slightly differently.

Caleb Crain

#23. Would you fancy a shag?"
"Is that like a scrum?"
"It could be.

Caleb Crain

#24. And suddenly it was all too much for him. He felt sad and misplaced, with the abrupt, overwhelming, dizzying sadness that comes over people in countries not their own, which has none of the richness of feeling that usually comes with sadness but is rather a kind of exhaustion.

Caleb Crain

#25. It was a mistake to think that in the new world they would be able to care in the old way. In the new world you had to find something of value and learn not to care for it. You had to learn how to sell it.

Caleb Crain

#26. He was in the flow of time now. He was in a story.

Caleb Crain

#27. No radio, no telephone," Melinda observed. "No mod cons whatsoever in Hloubetin, are there."
"We have a hamster," Jacob said.
"Not traditionally considered an amenity.

Caleb Crain

#28. Like capitalism," Carl suggested. "'We'll give you so much pleasure, you'll never want to try another socioeconomic system.

Caleb Crain

#29. But what are they?" Annie asked.
"An omphalos, probably," said Jacob.
"A what, dear?" Melinda asked.
"A bellybutton of the world."
"I didn't know it had one.

Caleb Crain

#30. They sat talking naked so often and so long perhaps because they liked to be able to read the whole opalescent page of each other at once.

Caleb Crain

#31. To find the spirit of change - was that it? - after the change had happened.

Caleb Crain

#32. In Rome the statues, in Paris the paintings, and in Prague the buildings suggest that pleasure can be an education.

Caleb Crain

#33. What if his ambitions was just a name he gave to a kind of conformity, and he was going back because he wasn't brave enough to live a life that wasn't expected of him, a life so far from any road that there wouldn't be any signposts or milestones?

Caleb Crain

#34. Since he had given up men he had taken up geography. He visited a new sight or a new neighborhood nearly every weekend.

Caleb Crain

#35. A year ago he had been in America. Two years ago he had been straight. Tonight he was underground, with the remains of the bogey man, lit by the torches of the children who had killed him.

Caleb Crain