Patrick deWitt Quotes

The creak of bed springs suffering under the weight of a restless man is as lonely a sound as I know.

Hurried business is bad business.

This perhaps was what lay at the root of the hysteria surrounding what came to be known as the Gold Rush: Men desiring a feeling of fortune; the unlucky masses hoping to skin or borrow the luck of others, or the luck of a destination. A seductive notion, and one I thought to be wary of. To me, luck was something you either earned or invented through strength of character. You had to come by it honestly; you could not trick or bluff your way into it.

I lay in the dark thinking about the difficulties of family, how crazy and crooked the stories of a bloodline can be.

He only wished to fight and cultivate an anger toward me, thus alleviating his guilt, but I would not abet him in this.

…things I had come to find humor in would make your honest man swoon.

Luck was something you either earned or invented through strength of character. You had to come by it honestly; you could not trick or bluff your way into it.

I will admit he is unusual, but that is perhaps the closest I could come to complimenting him.

I had never been with a woman for longer than a night, and they had always been whores. And while throughout each of these speedy encounters I tried to maintain a friendliness with the women, I knew in my heart it was false, and afterward always felt remote and caved in. I had in the last year or so given up whores entirely, thinking it best to go without rather than pantomime human closeness.

…but I could not sleep without proper covering and spent the rest of the night rewriting lost arguments from my past, altering history so that I emerged victorious.

Come with me into the world and reclaim your independence. You stand to gain so much, and riches are the least of it.

Returning his pen to its holder, he told us, ‘I will have him gutted with that scythe. I will hang him by his own intestines.’ At this piece of dramatic exposition, I could not hep but roll my eyes. A length of intestines would not carry the weight of a child, much less a full grown man.