In God We Trust Quotes

“Semicolon, you dolt!”
― Jean Shepherd, A Christmas Story

“Preparing to go to school was like getting ready for extended deep sea diving.”
― Jean Shepherd, In God We Trust: All Others Pay Cash

“The Bumpuses were so low down on the evolutionary totem pole that they weren't even included in Darwin's famous family tree. They had inbred and ingrown and finally emerged from the Kentucky hills like some remnant of Attila the Hung's barbarian horde. Flick said that they had webbed feet and only three toes. It might have been true.”
― Jean Shepherd, A Christmas Story

“There are fewer things more thrilling in life than lumpy letters. That rattle.”
― Jean Shepherd, In God We Trust: All Others Pay Cash

“In God we trust: all others pay cash.”
― Jean Shepherd, In God We Trust: All Others Pay Cash

“Kissel worked in Idleness the way other artists worked in clay or marble.”
― Jean Shepherd, In God We Trust: All Others Pay Cash

“Dynamite was the milk of life to the average hillbilly of the day. He celebrated with it, feuded with it, and fished with it. The Sporting instinct runs strong in the hills. When the fishing season would open, the river would literally be aboil with TNT.”
― Jean Shepherd, In God We Trust: All Others Pay Cash

“The show was over and you had a sinister feeling that out there in the darkness all over the country there were millions of kids—decoding.”
― Jean Shepherd, A Christmas Story: The Book That Inspired the Hilarious Classic Film

“Delbert was the only Bumpus kid in my grade, but they infested Warren G. Harding like termites in an outhouse. There was Ima Jean, short and muscular, who was in the sixth grade, when she showed up, but spent most of her time hanging around the poolroom. There was a lanky, blue-jowled customer they called Jamie, who ran the still and was the only one who ever wore shoes. He and his brother Ace, who wore a brown fedora and blue work shirts, sat on the front steps at home on the Fourth of July, sucking at a jug and pretending to light sticks of dynamite with their cigars when little old ladies walked by. There were also several red-faced girls who spent most of their time dumping dishwater out of windows. Babies of various sizes and sexes crawled about the back yard, fraternizing indiscriminately with the livestock. They all wore limp, battleship-gray T-shirts and nothing else. They cried day and night. We thought that was all of them—until one day a truck stopped in front of the house and out stepped a girl who made Daisy Mae look like Little Orphan Annie. My father was sprinkling the lawn at the time; he wound up watering the windows. Ace and Emil came running out onto the porch, whooping and hollering. The girl carried a cardboard suitcase—in which she must have kept all her underwear, if she owned any—and wore her blonde hair piled high on her head; it gleamed in the midday sun. Her short muslin dress strained and bulged. The truck roared off. Ace rushed out to greet her, bellowing over his shoulder as he ran: “MAH GAWD! HEY, MAW, IT’S CASSIE! SHE’S HOME FROM THE REFORMATORY!” Emil”
― Jean Shepherd, A Christmas Story: The Book That Inspired the Hilarious Classic Film

“Delbert Bumpus entered Warren G. Harding like a small, truculent rhinoceros. His hair grew low down on his almost nonexistent forehead, and he had the greatest pair of ears that Warren G. Harding had ever seen, extending at absolutely right angles from his head. Between those ears festered a pea-sized but malevolent brain that almost immediately made him the most feared kid below sixth grade. He had a direct way of settling disagreements that he established on the second day of his brief but spectacular period at W.G.H.”
― Jean Shepherd, A Christmas Story: The Book That Inspired the Hilarious Classic Film

“I said, what’s yer first name, kid?” Bumpus, backed up flat against the school wall, finally spoke up: “Delbert.” “Delbert! DELBERT!” Outraged by such a name, Dill addressed the crowd, with scorn dripping from his every word. “Delbert Bumpus! They’re letting everybody in Harding School these days! What the hell kind of a name is that? That must be some kind of hillbilly name!” It was the last time anyone at Warren G. Harding ever said, or even thought, anything like that about Delbert Bumpus. Everything happened so fast after that that no two accounts of it were the same. The way I saw it, Bumpus’ head snapped down low between his shoulder blades. He bent over from the waist, charged over the sand like a wounded wart hog insane with fury, left his feet and butted his black, furry head like a battering-ram into Dill’s rib cage, the sickening thump sounding exactly like a watermelon dropped from a second-story window. Dill, knocked backward by the charge, landed on his neck and slid for three or four feet, his face alternating green and white. His eyes, usually almost unseen behind his cobra lids, popped out like a tromped-on toad-frog’s. He lay flat, gazing paralyzed at the spring sky, one shoe wrenched off his foot by the impact. The schoolyard was hushed, except for the sound of a prolonged gurling and wheezing as Dill, now half his original size, lay retching. It was obvious that he was out of action for some time. Bumpus”
― Jean Shepherd, A Christmas Story: The Book That Inspired the Hilarious Classic Film

“She also had this friend named The Asp, who whenever she was really in a tight spot would just show up and cut everybody’s head off.”
― Jean Shepherd, A Christmas Story: The Book That Inspired the Hilarious Classic Film

“Cold was something that was accepted, like air, clouds, and parents; a fact of Nature, and as such could not be used in any fraudulent scheme to stay out of school.”
― Jean Shepherd, A Christmas Story: The Book That Inspired the Hilarious Classic Film

“My mind, as is so often the case these days, was totally blank.”
― Jean Shepherd, In God We Trust: All Others Pay Cash

“It was an important moment. Here was a real milestone, and I knew it. I was taking my first step up that great ladder of becoming a real American. Nothing is as important to an American as a membership card with a seal. I know guys who have long strings of them, plastic-enclosed: credit cards, membership cards, identification cards, Blue Cross cards, driver’s licenses, all strung together in a chain of Love. The longer the chain, the more they feel they belong. Here was my first card. I was on my way. And the best of all possible ways—I was making it as a Phony. A non-Ovaltine drinking Official Member.”
― Jean Shepherd, In God We Trust: All Others Pay Cash

“There are about four times in a man’s life, or a woman’s, too, for that matter, when unexpectedly, from out of the darkness, the blazing carbon lamp, the cosmic searchlight of Truth shines full upon them. It is how we react to those moments that forever seals our fate. One crowd simply puts on its sunglasses, lights another cigar, and heads for the nearest plush French restaurant in the jazziest section of town, sits down and orders a drink, and ignores the whole thing. While we, the Doomed, caught in the brilliant glare of illumination, see ourselves inescapably for what we are, and from that day on skulk in the weeds, hoping no one else will spot us.”
― Jean Shepherd, In God We Trust: All Others Pay Cash

“It is no coincidence that the Zip Green was invented by kids.”
― Jean Shepherd, In God We Trust: All Others Pay Cash