Poe Ballantine Quotes

#1. 'Love and Terror on the Howling Plains of Nowhere' took me six years to write.

Poe Ballantine

#2. We have a lot to learn from [bonobos], because they're a very egalitarian society and they're a very empathetic society. Sexual behavior is not confined to one aspect of their life that they set aside. It permeates their entire life.

Sue Savage-Rumbaugh

#3. I first came across Chadron, Nebraska, by accident in 1994.

Poe Ballantine

#4. I'm that sensitive, honest guy who likes people, wants to know why, and who puzzles everyone by continually putting himself in harm's way.

Poe Ballantine

#5. My older son who is, I think, here tonight, is forty-one years old. Which is odd because so am I.

Robert B. Parker

#6. Western Nebraska is the only place in all my travels where I have seen the dust blowing and the rain falling at the same time.

Poe Ballantine

#7. I have learned that I am not built for conflict or controversy. I have also learned that, in all my life, I have never chosen a story. The story has always chosen me.

Poe Ballantine

#8. I go to dance clubs ... about once a year just to justify the other 364 days I spend in my apartment going 'God, what idiots!'

Bill Hicks

#9. Chadron had a water tower, grain elevators, a tanning salon, a video rental store, a small liberal arts college, a Hardee's, a stoplight, and a curling yellow sign in the pet store window that read, 'Hamsters and Tarantulas Featured Today.'

Poe Ballantine

#10. I'm not mad about movies, there are too many people involved in the making of them, and they lack a definitive creative focus.

David Bailey

#11. Leave safety behind. Put your body on the line. Stand before the people you fear and speak your mind - even if your voice shakes. When you least expect it, someone may actually listen to what you have to say. Well-aimed slingshots can topple giants.

Maggie Kuhn

#12. I'm compared to Kerouac, I suppose, because he traveled and rejected middle-class values, but the similarities end there.

Poe Ballantine

#13. I tried to write something about Jesse but couldn't, as her face echoed her father's and the proud palace where the ghosts of our old life dwell.

Patti Smith

#14. Because I've lived a risky and unconventional life, I don't often struggle for subjects to write about.

Poe Ballantine

#15. All my life, I never realized you could have a conversation with a ghost.

Poe Ballantine

#16. A bilingual marriage, by the way, is a great way to stay together for longer than you normally would because you can't understand each other very well.

Poe Ballantine

#17. I read to him from his mother's Bible the first line of Genesis: 'In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth.' It says nothing about hell, Tom. That came later with the membership drive.

Poe Ballantine

#18. Short chaps evolved naturally, but I didn't title and number them till much later. I like short chaps, like short books too, as a rule.

Poe Ballantine

#19. Most people would live in an outhouse in Bangladesh before they would voluntarily move to Nebraska.

Poe Ballantine

#20. It'll be okay," I said.
"We're here for you." Kelly said.
"I've decided to become a divorce lawyer," Amanda said.
Well, we all have our own ways of showing we care.

Janette Rallison

#21. I studied a truckload of true crime, praying for illumination, but most true crime relies on luridness and voyeurism for effect.

Poe Ballantine

#22. The Irish way of telling a story is a complex and elaborate one, complete with wild exaggerations, a certain delight in improbable fantasy, and a heightened sense of drama.

Rashers Tierney

#23. I believe that if you want to fight inequality you have to do it starting at infancy.

Michelle Bachelet

#24. There's good money in true crime, I'm told, and plenty of it lying around, but it's a devil of an art form.

Poe Ballantine

#25. One evening, after my wife and son had gone out for a walk, I decided to have a talk with my neighbor, who I believe was murdered. I had gotten to know and admire him by listening to people talk about him. He seemed a wonderful person with much to give.

Poe Ballantine

#26. Amazon is evil, like anything big, but we can't help if it flows the very center of literature.

Poe Ballantine