But I knew the way the people in the town thought about things. They always had some time left over from their life to bother about other people and what they did. They thought they had to get together to help other people out, like the time they got together about the woman who let a colored man borrow her car and told her the best place for her was up north with all the other nigger lovers, and the time they got the veterans with overseas wives out. If you were different from anybody in town, you had to get out. That's why everybody was so much alike. The way they talked, what they did, what they liked, what they hated. If somebody got to hate something and he was the right person, everybody had to hate it too, or people began to hate the ones who didn't hate it. They used to tell us in school to think for yourself, but you couldn't do that in the town. You had to think what your father thought all his life, and that was what everybody thought. John Kennedy Toole
Some Similar Quotes
  1. The acceptance of oneself is the essence of the whole moral problem and the epitome of a whole outlook on life. That I feed the hungry, that I forgive an insult, that I love my enemy in the name of Christ -- all these are... - C.g. Jung
  2. Do you know what hurts so very much? It's love. Love is the strongest force in the world, and when it is blocked that means pain. There are two things we can do when this happens. We can kill that love so that it stops... - Corrie Ten Boom
  3. When you have reached the point where you no longer expect a response, you will at last be able to give in such a way that the other is able to receive, and be grateful. When Love has matured and, through a dissolution of the... - Unknown
  4. Love is larger than the walls which shut it in. - Corrie Ten Boom
  5. I have come home at last! This is my real country! I belong here. This is the land I have been looking for all my life, though I never knew it till now... Come further up, come further in! - C.s. Lewis
More Quotes By John Kennedy Toole
  1. ...I doubt very seriously whether anyone will hire me.' What do you mean, babe? You a fine boy with a good education.' Employers sense in me a denial of their values.' He rolled over onto his back. 'They fear me. I suspect that they can...
  2. It smells terrible in here.' Well, what do you expect? The human body, when confined, produces certain odors which we tend to forget in this age of deodorants and other perversions. Actually, I find the atmosphere of this room rather comforting. Schiller needed the scent...
  3. 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.
  4. The day before me is fraught with God knows what horrors.
  5. 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.
Related Topics