Top 99 John Kennedy Toole Quotes
#1. I would like to see 'A Confederacy of Dunces' by John Kennedy Toole adapted.
Tamara Feldman
#2. In my private apocalypse he will be impaled upon his own nightstick.
John Kennedy Toole
#3. Had that poor Reilly kook really been proud of Levy Pants? He had always said that he was. That was one good sign of his insanity.
John Kennedy Toole
#4. Employers sense in me a denial of their values ... they fear me. i suspect that they can see that i am forced to function in a century which i loathe.
John Kennedy Toole
#6. Ignatius, all at once you're your horrible old self. All at once I think I'm making a very big mistake.
John Kennedy Toole
#7. You must realize the fear and hatred which my weltanschauung instills in people.
John Kennedy Toole
#8. Shifting from one hip to the other in his lumbering, elephantine fashion, Ignatius sent waves of flesh rippling beneath the tweed and flannel, waves that broke upon buttons and seams. Thus
John Kennedy Toole
#9. This...is a new crutch to help you make excuses for your meaningless, impotent existence.
John Kennedy Toole
#10. Dictatorship naturally arises out of democracy, and the most aggravated form of tyranny and slavery out of the most extreme liberty.
John Kennedy Toole
#11. I am at the moment writing a lengthy indictment against our century. When my brain begins to reel from my literary labors, I make an occasional cheese dip.
John Kennedy Toole
#12. I was appalled that so meaningless a person would dare such effrontery.
John Kennedy Toole
#13. This guy was a real Pscyho' Mr. Levy said.
'To you character is a psychosis, integrity is a complex. I've heard it all before.
John Kennedy Toole
#14. Having once been so high, humanity fell so low. What had once been dedicated to the soul was now dedicated to the sale.
John Kennedy Toole
#15. I doubt whether any hack, under pressure, could pen such atrocious melodrama,
John Kennedy Toole
#16. I really don't have the time to discuss the errors of your value judgements.
John Kennedy Toole
#17. Apparently I am pushing a jinx about the streets. I am certain that I can do better with some other wagon. A new cart, a new start.
John Kennedy Toole
#18. Once a person was asked to step into this brutal century, anything could happen
John Kennedy Toole
#19. a block that had moved into the twentieth century carelessly and uncaringly - and with very limited funds.
John Kennedy Toole
#20. This is clearly a case for the Civil Liberties Union," Ignatius observed, squeezing his mother's drooping shoulder with the paw. "We must contact Myrna Minkoff, my lost love. She knows about those things.
John Kennedy Toole
#21. Look at that. She think I got siphlus and TB and a hard-on and I gonna cut her up with a razor and lif her purse. Ooo-wee.
John Kennedy Toole
#22. Please, go away!" Ignatius screamed. "You're shattering my religious ecstasy.
John Kennedy Toole
#23. I mingle with my peers or no one, and since I have no peers, I mingle with no one.
John Kennedy Toole
#24. Ignatius, what's all this trash on the floor?"
"That is my worldview that you see. It still must be incorporated into a whole, so be careful where you step.
John Kennedy Toole
#25. Canned food is a perversion,' Ignatius said. 'I suspect that it is ultimately very damaging to the soul.
John Kennedy Toole
#27. The human desire for food and sex is relatively equal. If there are armed rapes, why should there not be armed hot dog thefts?
John Kennedy Toole
#28. Jail was preferable. There they only limited you physically. In a mental ward they tampered with your soul and worldview and mind.
John Kennedy Toole
#29. No wonder you've turned on me so savagely. I suspect that you are using me as a scapegoat for your own feelings of guilt.
John Kennedy Toole
#30. Go dangle your withered parts over the toilet!' Ignatius screamed savagely.
John Kennedy Toole
#31. This liberal doxy must be impaled on the member of a particularly large stallion!
John Kennedy Toole
#32. I avoid that bleak first hour of the working day during which my still sluggish senses and body make every chore a penance. I find that in arriving later, the work which I do perform is of a much higher quality.
John Kennedy Toole
#33. Mother, when was this coffee dripped?" Ignatius demanded, flapping into the kitchen again.
"Just about a hour ago. Why?"
"It certainly tastes brackish.
John Kennedy Toole
#34. Perhaps the experience can give my writing a new dimension. Being actively engaged in the system which I criticize will be an interesting irony in itself.
John Kennedy Toole
#35. Just look at my sweater, you disgusting monster."
"Only the most flamboyant offal would be seen in a miscarriage like that. You must have some shame or at least some taste in dress.
John Kennedy Toole
#36. Is my paranoia getting completely out of hand, or are you mongoloids really talking about me?
John Kennedy Toole
#38. When my brain begins to reel from my literary labors, I make an occassional cheese dip.
John Kennedy Toole
#39. I refuse to "look up." Optimism nauseates me. It is perverse. Since man's fall, his proper position in the universe has been one of misery.
John Kennedy Toole
#40. She ran into the bathroom and powdered her face and the front of her dress, drew a surrealistic version of a mouth beneath her nose, and dashed into her bedroom to find a coat.
John Kennedy Toole
#42. The only excursion of my life outside of New Orleans took me through the vortex to the whirlpool of despair: Baton Rouge ... New Orleans is, on the other hand, a comfortable metropolis which has a certain apathy and stagnation which I find inoffensive.
John Kennedy Toole
#43. I should have known that every time I open the door of my room I am literally opening a Pandora's Box.
John Kennedy Toole
#44. You could tell by the way he talked, though, that he had gone to school a long time. That was probably what was wrong with him.
John Kennedy Toole
#45. Like a bitch in heat, I seem to attract a coterie of policemen and sanitation officials.
John Kennedy Toole
#46. Schiller needed the scent of apples rotting in his desk in order to write. I, too, have my needs.
John Kennedy Toole
#47. Although the style of each varied in crudity, the subjects of the paintings were relatively similar: camellias floating in bowls of water, azaleas tortured into ambitious flower arrangements, magnolias that looked like white windmills.
John Kennedy Toole
#48. Leaving New Orleans also frightened me considerably. Outside of the city limits the heart of darkness, the true wasteland begins.
John Kennedy Toole
#49. Over the years I have become very good at getting out of things I don't want to do.
John Kennedy Toole
#50. Whoa! If I'm gonna be a doorman, I gonna be the mos sabotagin doorman ever guarded a plantation. Ooo-wee. The cotton fiel be burn to the groun before I'm through."
Watch out, Jones. Don be getting yourself in no trouble."
Whoa!
John Kennedy Toole
#51. Apparently I lack some particular perversion which today's employer is seeking.
John Kennedy Toole
#52. Like two figures in the medieval Morality play, Pragmatism and Morality spar in the boxing ring of my brain.
John Kennedy Toole
#53. She appears to have been knocked a bit in her life already. Up rather than down. If she ever nears me, however, the direction will be reversed.
John Kennedy Toole
#55. Too long have I confined myself in Miltonic isolation and meditation. It is clearly time for me to step boldly into our society, not in the boring, passive manner of the Myrna Minkoff school of social action, but with great style and zest.
John Kennedy Toole
#57. ...the nation as a whole has no contact with reality. That is only one of the reasons why I have always been forced to exist on the fringes of its society, consigned to the Limbo reserved for those who do know reality when they see it.
John Kennedy Toole
#59. She went up to his bedroom door and listened to the wildly twanging bed springs as they reached a crescendo as they built toward a finale worthy of Grieg's 'In the Hall of the Mountain King
John Kennedy Toole
#60. I should perhaps warn you that I am about to faint from anxiety and general depression, though. The film I saw last night was especially grueling, a teen-age beach musical. I almost collapsed during the singing sequence on surfboard.
John Kennedy Toole
#62. You can always tell employees of the government by the total vacancy which occupies the space where most other people have faces.
John Kennedy Toole
#64. It's not your fate to be well treated," Ignatius cried. "You're an overt masochist. Nice treatment will confuse and destroy you.
John Kennedy Toole
#65. I want that Easter Ham. Where's my Thanksgiving Turkey? Miss Trixie snarled
John Kennedy Toole
#66. Mr. Gonzalez watched Mr. Zalatimo probing his long index finger high into one of his nostrils. What would this one do? His feet tingled with fear.
John Kennedy Toole
#67. Remember I'm from Dauphine Street. We useta put the kitchen chairs out on the banquette and set there till midnight sometimes waiting for the house to cool off. And the things the people down here say! Lord.
John Kennedy Toole
#68. Oh, Fortuna, blind, heedless goddess, I am strapped to your wheel,' Ignatius belched, 'Do not crush me beneath your spokes. Raise me on high, divinity.
John Kennedy Toole
#69. On the prow of the wagon, in an attempt to attract business among the Quarterites, Ignatius taped a sheet of Big Chief paper on which he had printed in crayon: TWELVE INCHES (12) OF PARADISE. So far no one had responded to its message.
John Kennedy Toole
#70. I don't drive. Will you kindly go away? I am waiting for my mother.
John Kennedy Toole
#71. What is it, Gus? A problem? Are you having a problem? That's one of your problems. You never tell me your problems.
John Kennedy Toole
#72. I would very much like to know what the Founding Fathers would say if they could see these children being debauched to further the cause of Clearasil. However, I always suspected that democracy would come to this.
John Kennedy Toole
#73. Oh, my God!" Ignatius bellowed from the front of the house. "What an egregious insult to good taste.
John Kennedy Toole
#74. Myrna was not astigmatic; the lenses were clear glass; she wore the glasses to prove her dedication and intensity of purpose.
John Kennedy Toole
#75. Will you please stop screeching like a fishmonger and run along? Don't you have a bottle of muscatel baking in the oven?
John Kennedy Toole
#76. Mrs. Reilly called in that accent that occurs south of New Jersey only in New Orleans, that Hoboken near the Gulf of Mexico.
John Kennedy Toole
#77. They would try to make me into a moron who liked television and new cars and frozen food. Don't you understand? Psychiatry is worse than communism. I refuse to be brainwashed. I won't be a robot!
John Kennedy Toole
#78. Possession of anything new or expensive only reflected a person's lack of theology and geometry; it could even cast doubts upon one's soul.
John Kennedy Toole
#79. I bet you cook good, huh?" Darlene asked.
"Mother doesn't cook," Ignatius said dogmatically.
"She burns.
John Kennedy Toole
#80. Talc: You have been found guilty of misleading and perverting the young. I decree that you be
hung by your underdeveloped testicles until dead. ZORRO
John Kennedy Toole
#81. I suspect that I am the result of particularly weak conception on the part of my father. His sperm was probably emitted in a rather offhand manner.
John Kennedy Toole
#84. When Fortuna spins you downward, go out to a movie and get more out of life.
John Kennedy Toole
#85. This is a floral abortion,' Ignatius commented irritably and tapped the vase with his cutlas. 'Dyed flowers are unnatural and perverse and, I suspect, obscene also. I can see that I am going to have my hands full with you people.
John Kennedy Toole
#86. It would bring all of my latent anxieties to a head, and the result, I fear, would be very ugly indeed.
John Kennedy Toole
#88. A firm rule must be imposed upon our nation before it destroys itself. The United States needs some theology and geometry, some taste and decency. I suspect that we are teetering on the edge of the abyss.
John Kennedy Toole
#89. I thought that the vibrissae about my nostrils detected something unique while I was outside.
John Kennedy Toole
#91. That fat freak a guarantee one hunner percen nucular bum. Shit. Drop him on somebody, everbody gettin caught in the fallout, gettin their ass blowed up.
John Kennedy Toole
#93. Health note: My stomach is getting out of bounds; the seams of my vendor's smock are creaking ominously.
John Kennedy Toole
#94. My life is a rather grim one. One day I shall perhaps describe it to you in great detail.
John Kennedy Toole
#96. With the breakdown of the medieval system, the gods of chaos, lunacy, and bad taste gained ascendancy.
John Kennedy Toole
#97. My mother is currently associating with some undesirables who are attempting to transform her into an athlete of sorts, deprave specimens of mankind who regularly bowl their way to oblivion.
John Kennedy Toole
#99. Filth!' Ignatious shouted, spewing wet popcorn over rows. 'How dare she pretend to be a virgin. Look at her degenerate face. Rape her!
John Kennedy Toole
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