Beginner's Luke Quotes

“I just want to live my own life instead of everyone else’s version of it.”
― Sol Luckman, Beginner's Luke

“When it rains it pours and when it shines you get melanoma.”
― Sol Luckman, Beginner's Luke

“Such is life, imaginary or otherwise: a continuous parting of ways, a constant flux of approximation and distanciation, lines of fate intersecting at a point which is no-time, a theoretical crossroads fictitiously 'present,' an unstable ice floe forever drifting between was and will be.”
― Sol Luckman, Beginner's Luke

“Down below people were clipping by going nowhere fast. You could feel the long despairing history of the place. You could actually hear it, a low hum like the buzz of a sick bee that resonated with the fragments of a million broken dreams.”
― Sol Luckman, Beginner's Luke

“Over the years most of my peers had come to hate me—I never understood why. I guess I was just different and, like dogs, they could smell it. So I never had many friends.”
― Sol Luckman, Beginner's Luke

“It takes money to make money, even begging. Humans are herd animals. If a stranger’s bleeding to death beside the road, most people won’t stop to offer a Band-Aid. But get the ball rolling with a couple Good Samaritans, and before you know it you’ve got more eager philanthropists than you know what to do with.”
― Sol Luckman, Beginner's Luke

“The simple act of sitting here sipping this cappuccino is its own testament to my commitment to living the writer’s life. Which is to say: doing nothing but doing it exceedingly well.”
― Sol Luckman, Beginner's Luke

“Begging is much more difficult than it looks. Contrary to popular belief, it’s a high art form that takes years of dedicated practice to master.”
― Sol Luckman, Beginner's Luke

“I wouldn’t be caught dead sacrificing myself for this country.”
― Sol Luckman, Beginner's Luke

“It was a rotten time to try to be a man in America. Until Blue came along I’d never even spent time around a man. Hell, I’d never even seen one. Where were all the men in this once great land?”
― Sol Luckman, Beginner's Luke

“Have you ever noticed how good things go to those who hate?”
― Sol Luckman, Beginner's Luke

“True, beneath the human façade, I was an interloper, an alien whose ship had crashed beyond hope of repair in the backwoods of Southern Appalachia—but at least I’d learned to walk and talk enough like the locals to be rejected as one of their own.”
― Sol Luckman, Beginner's Luke

“Finally, we entered Chetaube County, my imaginary birthplace, where the names of the little winding roads and minuscule mountain communities never failed to inspire me: Yardscrabble, Big Log, Upper, Middle and Lower Pigsty, Chicken Scratch, Cooterville, Felchville, Dust Rag, Dough Bag, Uranus Ridge, Big Bottom, Hooter Holler, Quickskillet, Buck Wallow, Possum Strut ... We always say a picture speaks a thousand words, but isn’t the opposite equally true?”
― Sol Luckman, Beginner's Luke

“I relinquished myself to existence pure and simple, thinking absolutely nothing—as if my mind were merely an echo chamber for the music, as if it contained only ether or at most a vaguely pleasant odor as of roses preserved between the pages of a book, their significance long forgotten. The tongue of the road gobbled me up and I allowed myself to sink like a tasty mouthful all the way to the bottom of a marvelous, rejuvenating vacuity. Later, it would occur to me it’s the emptiness we mistakenly call Innocence.”
― Sol Luckman, Beginner's Luke

“Home. The word circled comfortably in my mouth like bubble gum, swished around sweetly soft and satisfying. Home. Try saying it aloud to yourself. Home. Isn’t it like taking a bite of something lovely? If only we could eat words.”
― Sol Luckman, Beginner's Luke

“The Adventure called and I followed with my thumb like a character being written by an intractable author. Which, of course, I was.”
― Sol Luckman, Beginner's Luke

“Nothing bonds two solitary individuals like a good shared drunk. This is a scientific fact. It’s important, even necessary for the long-term welfare of the planet to get good and shit-faced with your neighbor every now and then.”
― Sol Luckman, Beginner's Luke

“Life is too short to waste being a productive member of society.”
― Sol Luckman, Beginner's Luke

“So it was a crossroads summer, when the universe seemed to stand perilously still like an egg wobbling on a precipice, a regular rite of passage summer that saw us traverse the hazardous divide between the illusions of boyhood and the far more pernicious deceptions of maturity, et cetera.”
― Sol Luckman, Beginner's Luke

“I knew I was in deep shit. I didn’t know how deep—just that I still hadn’t touched bottom.”
― Sol Luckman, Beginner's Luke

“I wondered about my inner child. In fact, I was troubled. Did I even have an inner child, I asked myself, given that, in essence, I’d just been born?”
― Sol Luckman, Beginner's Luke

“Nobody ever goes to that store to shop because it’s too crowded.”
― Sol Luckman, Beginner's Luke

“I am, as it were, the created creating—a paradox, for all its rhetorical trappings, at the beating heart of our shared human journey, and one I invite you to struggle with just as I have while, day in and day out, word by word and line by line, constructing a fictitious autobiography for myself in these pages.”
― Sol Luckman, Beginner's Luke

“The beauty of a metaphor is it doesn't have to be real to ring true. The instant a metaphor becomes true it ceases to be a metaphor, which suggests a disconnect between truth and what's commonly referred to as reality.”
― Sol Luckman, Beginner's Luke