Elliott Chaze Quotes & Sayings

Because you can't kiss your way out of prison and I knew that for sure. For dead sure. — Elliott Chaze

The primary conception of tennis is to get the ball over the net and at the same time to keep it within bounds of the court; failing this, within the borders of the neighborhood. — Elliott Chaze

Primarily I have a simple desire to shine my ass - to show off a bit in print. — Elliott Chaze

Most of living is waiting to live. And you spend a great deal of time worrying about things that don't matter and about people that don't matter and all this is clear to you when you know the very day you're going to die. — Elliott Chaze

If your life can hang from a chewing gum wrapper it can hang from anything in the book. It can hang from a bullet no bigger than a bean, or from a cigarette smoked in bed, or a bad breakfast that causes the doctor to sew the absorbent cotton inside you. From a slick tire tread or the hiccups or from kissing the wrong woman. Life is a rental proposition with no lease. For everybody, tall and short, muscles and fat, white and yellow, rich and poor. I know that now. And it is good to know at a time like this — Elliott Chaze

When a rich man dies it is more complex than when a poor man dies. A rich man doesn't simply quit living. He quits being rich, too. — Elliott Chaze

Out West all the smells are sucked up out of the baked land by the sun. And it's as if all the colors in the ground are gobbled up by their sunsets, and so is the blue of the sky. The sky is high and pale and impersonal and you get the feeling it doesn't belong to you at all, but that it is the property of the chamber of commerce. In the South the sky is humid and low and rich and it's yours to smell and feel. In the West you're only an observer. In the West someone sees a flower growing on a mountain and he writes a whole damned pamphlet about it. — Elliott Chaze

She was sitting on the floor, naked, in a skitter of green bills. Beyond her was the custodian, still simpering in death. She was scooping up handfuls of the green money and dropping it on top of her head so that it came sliding down along the cream-colored hair, slipping down along her shoulders and body. She was making a noise I never heard come out of a human being. It was a scream that was a whisper and a laugh that was a cry. Over and over. The noise and the scooping. The slippery, sliding bills against the rigid body. She — Elliott Chaze

I read once that this man was in the chair and when the electrocutioner threw the switch the smoke came out of the man's head and formed a question mark over him and everybody said it was an omen, that maybe he didn't commit the murder they killed him for."
"Well," I said, "if they catch me, there won't be any question mark. There'll be an exclamation point. — Elliott Chaze

In tennis the addict moves about a hard rectangle and seeks to ambush a fuzzy ball with a modified snow-shoe. — Elliott Chaze