John Kennedy Toole Quotes

She appears to have been knocked a bit in her life already. Up rather than down. If she ever nears me, however, the direction will be reversed.

Shifting from one hip to the other in his lumbering, elephantine fashion, Ignatius sent waves of flesh rippling beneath the tweed and flannel, waves that broke upon buttons and seams. Thus

So we see that even when Fortuna spins us downward, the wheel sometimes halts for a moment and we find ourselves in a good, small cycle within the larger bad cycle. The universe, of course, is based u...

Speeding along in that bus was like hurtling into the abyss. By the time we had left the swamps and reached those rolling hills near Baton Rouge, I was getting afraid that some rural rednecks might to...

That fat freak a guarantee one hunner percen nucular bum. Shit. Drop him on somebody, everbody gettin caught in the fallout, gettin their ass blowed up.

This had been a very productive morning, he thought. He had not accomplished so much in weeks. Looking at the Big Chief tablets that made a rug of Indian headdresses around the bed, Ignatius thought s...

This was the sort of girl who should be attending college, not ones like that dreadful Minkoff girl, that brutal and slovenly girl who had almost been raped by one of the janitors just outside of his...

What is it, Gus? A problem? Are you having a problem? That's one of your problems. You never tell me your problems.

What you think about somebody wants peace, Claude? That sounds like a communiss to me. Mrs.

You must realize the fear and hatred which my instills in people.

Your total ignorance of that which you profess to teach merits the death penalty.

البته کار چندانی با آن‌ها نداشتم، چرا که من جز با همتای خود گرم نمی‌گیرم و از آن‌جایی که همتایی ندارم با کسی هم گرم نمی‌گیرم.

I tried to end our little duel. I called out pacifying words; I entreated; I finally surrendered. Still Clyde came, my pirate costume so great a success that it had apparently convinced him that we we...

When my brain begins to reel from my literary labors, I make an occassional cheese dip. John Kennedy Toole, A Confederacy of Dunces

The nation as a whole has no contact with reality. That is only one of the reasons why I have always been forced to exist on the fringes of its society, consigned to the Limbo reserved for those who d...

After all, I do not believe that one must necessarily scrape bottom, as it were, in order to view his society subjectively. Rather than moving vertically downward, one may move horizontally outward to...

Already the lecture is beginning to interest several dedicated people I know. One person who has promised to come (and bring several sharp friends, too) is a brilliant new contact I made during rush h...

Apparently I am pushing a jinx about the streets. I am certain that I can do better with some other wagon. A new cart, a new start.

Every difficult work presents us with a choice of whether to judge the author inept for not being clear, or ourselves stupid for not grasping what is going on. Montaigne encouraged us to blame the aut...

Here at any rate is Ignatius Reilly, without progenitor in any literature I know of—slob extraordinary, a mad Oliver Hardy, a fat Don Quixote, a perverse Thomas Aquinas rolled into one—who is in viole...