James Gould Cozzens Quotes & Sayings

Finally, spurred by the appetite to which he was indifferent, he took any one, read the printing on the parti-colored label of paper. He held the soup can like a skull; and at once he did not want it. The soup was made from celery. Mr. Lecky put it back. He stood in mild misery, harassed again by the plague of a will impotent in its restored freedom.
If the mind cannot direct, it can be cunning to protect its ease. Mr. Lecky now proposed a fantastic pact to himself. He shut his eyes. He reached again and took a can. Eyes still shut, he ripped the label from it, crumpled and threw away the paper. Now he could not tell what he had until he opened it. — James Gould Cozzens

Mr. Lecky never got any farther than the third floor. Not conscious of impossible fatigue, feeling less than his distress of the morning, he was notwithstanding seized by a faintness. This sudden spinning dizzied him. A darkness as impalpable, more discrete, yet blacker than night's, spun out from dancing points to overlapping disks. They were so wide, so close to his eyes, that he could not strike them off. He had only a second given him to see and apprehend. This same second loosened his grip on consciousness. He seemed to let go, hardly struggling. His muscles let go everywhere, too. He had time to hear, like some remote accident, the bang of the shotgun, gone, the smash of glass in at least one flashlight lens. This was the thin segment of the actual second, and Mr. Lecky knew nothing of himself slumping to lie on the stairs with the things he had dropped. — James Gould Cozzens

Be virtuous and you'll be happy Nonsense Be happy and you'll begin to be virtuous. — James Gould Cozzens

Whether he remained here, or found a means to leave, he ought certainly to possess himself of the best possible weapons. By the term Mr. Lecky understood some sort of firearm. The fact that he was totally unacquainted with the use of guns assisted him in the illusion that, given a revolver, he would instantly become formidable. Trusting machines as he did, he regarded a revolver as a small killing machine. He believed that its operation required little more than pointing and pulling a trigger. The revolver would obediently deliver, unerring and fast as light, death to a great distance. — James Gould Cozzens

Mr. Lecky could see well enough to eat. He brought his chair over and sat down gratefully while he consumed, but with appetite now, the ham and biscuits which he had disdained in the morning. Even the fact that he was using to cut his ham the knife which had cut a human throat did not disturb him. He had taken care to see that the blade was wiped clean. — James Gould Cozzens

At Childerstown High School and at college he had never led his class nor taken prizes; but, without being aware that he did, he really blamed this on his failure to work hard, or any harder than he needed to ... What he did not know, what Paul Bonbright, among others, showed him, was that those abilities of his that got him, without distinction but also without much exertion, through all previous lessons and examinations, were not first rate abilities handicapped by laziness, but second rate, by no degree of effort or assiduity to be made the equal of abilities like Bonbright's. — James Gould Cozzens

The innocent supposition, entertained by most people, that even if they are not brilliant, they are not dumb, is correct only in a very relative sense. — James Gould Cozzens

In the present, every day is a miracle. — James Gould Cozzens

I can't read ten pages of Steinbeck without throwing up. — James Gould Cozzens

Real rebels are rarely anything but second rate outside their rebellion; the drain of time and temper is ruinous to any other accomplishment. — James Gould Cozzens

I meditate and put on a rubber tire with three bottles of beer. Most of the time I just sit picking my nose and thinking. — James Gould Cozzens

Bailey might not have great intelligence or abilities, but his whole aim, thought and study was that of the born leader
to look out for himself; and he did it with that born-leader's confidence and intensity that draws along the ordinary uncertain man, who soon confuses his own interest and his own safety with that of the leader. — James Gould Cozzens

If a man felt hostility and aversion, but saw that he had poor or no grounds for his feeling, the remedy was to look for good or at least better grounds
a search hid predisposing thoughts would help him in. — James Gould Cozzens

The recognition of his carelessness filled Mr. Lecky with fear and anger. In the dusk his eerie heart could anticipate the hours of terror which he had laid up for himself. Sounds, real or imaginary, the silences and secrets of the night, the working of his own mind, skilled in cruel illusion and rich in evil fancy, would find him without recourse. — James Gould Cozzens

Mr. Lecky had proceeded quickly for several moments before he drew up, shocked. A few more steps and he might have stumbled on his idiot, for the stairs he had been approaching were the front stairs to the silverware department, which he wished to avoid. Shaken by this unpleasant mistake, he re-directed himself, turning back down the center of the dark floor. Certainly he did not want to see the corpse; the corpse could not very well want to see him. — James Gould Cozzens

A cynic is just a man who found out when he was about ten that there wasn't any Santa Claus, and he's still upset. Yes, there'll be more war ; and soon, I don't doubt. There always has been. There'll be deaths and disappointments and failures. When they come, you meet them. — James Gould Cozzens

Because in fact I only lived to write, see no sense in life, have only forced "interests," wish every night, not urgently but quite definitely I could just not wake up tomorrow. — James Gould Cozzens

When you can, always advise people to do what you see they really want to do. Doing what they want to do, they may succeed; doing what they don't want to do, they won't — James Gould Cozzens

The first test of ability and intelligence is to find a field of endeavor in which profits are large and risks small. — James Gould Cozzens