Neal A. Maxwell Quotes

“The laughter of the world is merely loneliness pathetically trying to reassure itself.”

“Georgie,' he said. Then he kissed her. That was it, really. That was when she added Neal to the list of things she wanted and needed and was bound to have someday. That's when she decided that Neal was the person who was going to drive on those overnight trips. And Neal was the one who is going to sit next to her at the Emmys. He kissed her like he was drawing a perfectly straight line. He kissed her in India ink. That's when Georgie decided, during that cocksure kiss, that Neal was what she needed to be happy.”

“God, had it really been that long? It had. Nineteen years since Georgie stumbled across Seth in the Spoon offices, seventeen years since she first noticed Neal, fourteen since she married him, standing beside a row of lilac trees in his parents' back yard. Georgie never thought she'd be old enough to talk about life in big, decade-long chunks like this. It's not that she'd thought she was going to die before now, she'd just never imagined it would feel this way, the heaviness of the proportions. Twenty years with the same dream, seventeen with the same man. Pretty soon she'd have been with Neal longer than she'd been without him. She'd know herself as his wife better than she'd ever known herself as anyone else. It felt like too much, not too much have, just too much to contemplate. Commitments like boulders that were too heavy to carry. Fourteen years since their wedding, fifteen years since Neal tried to drive away from her, fifteen since he drove back. Seventeen since she first saw him, saw something in him that she couldn't look away from.”

“We're roughage," Tyger said. "If we don't cause a little intestinal distress, no one knows we're there.”

“Like every other creature on the face of the earth, Godfrey was, by birthright, a stupendous badass, albeit in the somewhat narrow technical sense that he could trace his ancestry back up a long line of slightly less highly evolved stupendous badasses to that first self-replicating gizmo---which, given the number and variety of its descendants, might justifiably be described as the most stupendous badass of all time. Everyone and everything that wasn't a stupendous badass was dead.”

“No true hero ever believes that they are one.”

“All of the people took it up and sung it over and over until it was wrung dry, and no further innovations of tone and tempo were conceivable. Then they hushed and ate barbecue.”

“I'm against solutions that are worse than the problem. Like old women who want their hair dyed the color of shoe polish to hide the gray.”

“You could heal him?" I asked, glancing at Hal."Could," said the wysling, "but won't, until I get what's ”

“It's not odd these days to hear politicians trumpeting their own authenticity, a claim that an earlier day would have considered self-cancelling. But when Michelle Bachman, Rick Perry, and Rick Santorum say "I'm authentic," they're not evoking the shade of Neal Cassady. (102)”