20 of the best book quotes from The Winter of Our Discontent
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“Readers seeking to identify the fictional people and places here described would do better to inspect their own communities and search their own hearts, for this book is about a large part of America today.”
“Men don’t get knocked out, or I mean they can fight back against big things. What kills them is erosion; they get nudged into failure. They get slowly scared. I’m scared.”
“Sometimes a man seems to reverse himself so you would say, ‘he can’t do that. It’s out of character’. Maybe it’s not. It could just be another angle, or it might be that the pressures above or below have changed his shape. You see it in war a lot - a coward turning a hero and a brave man crashing in flames.”
“A man who tells secrets or stories must think of who is hearing or reading, for a story has as many versions as it has readers. Everyone takes what he wants or can from it and thus changes it to his measure. Some pick out parts and reject the rest, some strain the story through their mesh of prejudice, some paint it with their own delight. ”
“Any man of reasonable intelligence can make money if that’s what he wants. Mostly it’s women or clothes or admiration he really wants and they deflect him.”