Pete Hamill Quotes

14 Sourced Quotes

I don't ask for the meaning of the song of a bird or the rising of the sun on a misty morning. There they are, and they are beautiful.

Pete Hamill
Boxing is a sport of the poor, set up to the entertain the middle class.

Pete Hamill
The boy admonished himself for wanting everything to be a story. And now realized that some journeys were not stories. On some journeys, nothing really happened. You just kept taking steps.

Pete Hamill
In the end, the only thing the true New Yorker knows about New York is that it is unknowable.

Pete Hamill
Besides, skin color was skin color, right? It was just the color of your goddamned skin. There was nothing anybody could do about that. You were born with it. Like some people were born with big feet or blue eyes. You didn't make the choice. Your parents did. Or God did.

Pete Hamill
It's a good demonstration of will for any terrorist outfit to consider. If they knocked out every subway line and all the bus terminals, New Yorkers would leave the house, moaning, and find their way to work. That's our tribe.

Pete Hamill
A half-century later, Mark Twain would say that the gold rush drastically changed the American character, ending the tradition of patient apprenticeships, the gradual mastery of self, talent, and money. Gold created the get-rich-quick mentality that has been with us ever since, most recently during the dot-com bubble of the late 1990s.

Pete Hamill
New Yorkers, in general, love disaster. They love blizzards, power failures, etc. (I don't mean that they loved September 11.) A shared disaster brings them together more — ethnically, racially — because the disaster affects almost all of them, making no distinctions. Their manners are generally very good indeed. And their generosity can be without limits.

Pete Hamill
The culture of drink endures because it offers so many rewards: confidence for the shy, clarity for the uncertain, solace to the wounded and lonely, and above all, the elusive promises of friendship and love.

Pete Hamill
He looked at her for a long moment, as if remembering unfinished conversations, and then went back to place some damp, slow-burning turf on the fire.

Pete Hamill
The only way to fight nostalgia is to listen to somebody else's nostalgia.

Pete Hamill
Human beings want to know too much about each other, and that's why there are so many lies.

Pete Hamill
The world was a grand confusion. Finally, when I was drunk, and my mind couldn't do what I wanted it to do, I went home. I would lie alone In the dark, feeling that I was a character in a story that had lost its plot.

Pete Hamill
My ambition was to embrace those general qualities that Ernest Hemingway, a former newspaperman, once said should be present in all good books: 'the good and the bad, the ecstasy, the remorse and sorrow, the people and the places and how the weather was.'

Pete Hamill