Top 70 John Kennedy Toole Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “I am at the moment writing a lengthy indictment against our century. When my brain begins to reel from my literary labors, I make an occasional cheese dip.”

— John Kennedy Toole

2. “Leaving New Orleans also frightened me considerably. Outside of the city limits the heart of darkness, the true wasteland begins.”

— John Kennedy Toole

3. “A firm rule must be imposed upon our nation before it destroys itself. The United States needs some theology and geometry, some taste and decency. I suspect that we are teetering on the edge of the abyss.”

— John Kennedy Toole

4. “I avoid that bleak first hour of the working day during which my still sluggish senses and body make every chore a penance. I find that in arriving later, the work which I do perform is of a much higher quality.”

— John Kennedy Toole

5. “Mother went out again tonight, looking like a courtesan.”

— John Kennedy Toole

6. “I mingle with my peers or no one, and since I have no peers, I mingle with no one.”

— John Kennedy Toole

7. “Oh, Fortuna, you capricious sprite!”

— John Kennedy Toole

8. “Is my paranoia getting completely out of hand, or are you mongoloids really talking about me?”

— John Kennedy Toole

9. “I recommend Batman especially, for he tends to transcend the abysmal society in which he’s found himself. His morality is rather rigid, also. I rather respect Batman.”

— John Kennedy Toole

10. “Stop!? I cried imploringly to my god-like mind.”

— John Kennedy Toole

11. “Apparently I lack some particular perversion which today’s employer is seeking.”

— John Kennedy Toole

12. “I refuse to “look up.” Optimism nauseates me. It is perverse. Since man’s fall, his proper position in the universe has been one of misery.”

— John Kennedy Toole

13. “This liberal doxy must be impaled on the member of a particularly large stallion!”

— John Kennedy Toole

14. “My excellence confused them.”

— John Kennedy Toole

15. “The day before me is fraught with God knows what horrors.”

— John Kennedy Toole

16. “Jail was preferable. There they only limited you physically. In a mental ward they tampered with your soul and worldview and mind.”

— John Kennedy Toole

17. “It will all end very badly, Gus.”

— John Kennedy Toole

18. “Veneration of Mark Twain is one of the roots of our current intellectual stalemate.”

— John Kennedy Toole

19. “I should perhaps warn you that I am about to faint from anxiety and general depression, though. The film I saw last night was especially grueling, a teen-age beach musical. I almost collapsed during the singing sequence on surfboard.”

— John Kennedy Toole

20. “My mother is currently associating with some undesirables who are attempting to transform her into an athlete of sorts, deprave specimens of mankind who regularly bowl their way to oblivion.”

— John Kennedy Toole

21. “Once a person was asked to step into this brutal century, anything could happen.”

— John Kennedy Toole

22. “Had that poor Reilly kook really been proud of Levy Pants? He had always said that he was. That was one good sign of his insanity.”

— John Kennedy Toole

23. “I am an anachronism. People realize this and resent it.”

— John Kennedy Toole

24. “It’s not your fate to be well treated,” Ignatius cried. “You’re an overt masochist. Nice treatment will confuse and destroy you.”

— John Kennedy Toole

25. “Having once been so high, humanity fell so low. What had once been dedicated to the soul was now dedicated to the sale.”

— John Kennedy Toole

26. “When Fortuna spins you downward, go out to a movie and get more out of life.”

— John Kennedy Toole

27. “Here at any rate is Ignatius Reilly, without progenitor in any literature I know of – slob extraordinary, a mad Oliver Hardy, a fat Don Quixote, a perverse Thomas Aquinas rolled into one – who is in violent revolt against the entire modern age, lying in his flannel nightshirt, in a back bedroom on Constantinople Street in New Orleans, who between gigantic seizures of flatulence and eructations is filling dozens of Big Chief tablets with invective.”

— John Kennedy Toole

28. “Look at that. She think I got siphlus and TB and a hard-on and I gonna cut her up with a razor and lif her purse. Ooo-wee.”

— John Kennedy Toole

29. “So we see that even when Fortuna spins us downward, the wheel sometimes halts for a moment and we find ourselves in a good, small cycle within the larger bad cycle. The universe, of course, is based upon the principle of the circle within the circle. At the moment, I am in an inner circle. Of course, smaller circles within this circle are also possible.”

— John Kennedy Toole

30. “This is clearly a case for the Civil Liberties Union,” Ignatius observed, squeezing his mother’s drooping shoulder with the paw. “We must contact Myrna Minkoff, my lost love. She knows about those things.”

— John Kennedy Toole

31. “Shifting from one hip to the other in his lumbering, elephantine fashion, Ignatius sent waves of flesh rippling beneath the tweed and flannel, waves that broke upon buttons and seams. Thus.”

— John Kennedy Toole

32. “I suspect that I am the result of particularly weak conception on the part of my father. His sperm was probably emitted in a rather offhand manner.”

— John Kennedy Toole

33. “My life is a rather grim one. One day I shall perhaps describe it to you in great detail.”

— John Kennedy Toole

34. “Like two figures in the medieval Morality play, Pragmatism and Morality spar in the boxing ring of my brain.”

— John Kennedy Toole

35. “My mentality, uncontrollable and wanton as always, whispered to me a scheme so magnificent and daring that I shrank from the very thought of what I was hearing. “Stop!” I cried imploringly to my god-like mind. “This is madness.” But still I listened to the counsel of my brain. It was offering me the opportunity to Save the World Through Degeneracy.”

— John Kennedy Toole

36. “Suddenly Mrs. Reilly remembered the horrible night that she and Mr. Reilly had gone to Prytania to see Clark Gable and Jean Harlow in ‘Red Dust.’ In the heat and confusion that had followed their return home, nice Mr. Reilly had tried one of his indirect approaches, and Ignatius was conceived. Poor Mr. Reilly. He had never gone to another movie as long as he lived.”

— John Kennedy Toole

37. “New Orleans is, on the other hand, a comfortable metropolis which has a certain apathy and stagnation which I find inoffensive.”

— John Kennedy Toole

38. “Your total ignorance of that which you profess to teach merits the death penalty.”

— John Kennedy Toole

39. “Perhaps the experience can give my writing a new dimension. Being actively engaged in the system which I criticize will be an interesting irony in itself.”

— John Kennedy Toole

40. “Oh, shut up your little pussymouth, you mongoloid.”

— John Kennedy Toole

41. “In other words, you want to become totally bourgeois. You people have all been brainwashed. I imagine that you’d like to become a success or something equally vile.”

— John Kennedy Toole

42. “I want that Easter Ham. Where’s my Thanksgiving Turkey?” Miss Trixie snarled.”

— John Kennedy Toole

43. “Martyrdom is meaningless in our age.”

— John Kennedy Toole

44. “You could tell by the way he talked, though, that he had gone to school a long time. That was probably what was wrong with him.”

— John Kennedy Toole

45. “Oh, New Orleans is such freedom.”

— John Kennedy Toole

46. “I should have known that every time I open the door of my room I am literally opening a Pandora’s Box.”

— John Kennedy Toole

47. “Mothers got a hard road to travel, believe me.”

— John Kennedy Toole

48. “Why did you step out of my life, you minx? Your new hair-do is fascinating and cosmopolitan.” He snatched at her pigtail and pressed it to his wet moustache, kissing it vigorously. “The scent of soot and carbon in your hair excites me with suggestions of glamorous Gotham. We must leave immediately. I must go flower in Manhattan.”

— John Kennedy Toole

49. “Please, go away!” Ignatius screamed. “You’re shattering my religious ecstasy.”

— John Kennedy Toole

50. “Clean, hard-working, dependable, quiet type.′ Good God! What kind of monster is this that they want. I am afraid that I could never work for a concern with a worldview like that.”

— John Kennedy Toole