Top 50 Patrick deWitt Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “He is not bad, I don’t think. Perhaps he is simply too lazy to be good.”

— Patrick deWitt

2. “The creak of bed springs suffering under the weight of a restless man is as lonely a sound as I know.”

— Patrick deWitt

3. “Our blood is the same, we just use it differently.”

— Patrick deWitt

4. “I will try to be happy, you think, and your heart and chest feel a plummeting, as in the case of the hurtling rollercoaster, and your heart wants to cry and sob, but you, not wanting to cry, hit yourself hard in the center of your chest and it hurts so much but you drive on, your face dry and remaining dry, though it had been a close call, after all.”

— Patrick deWitt

5. “I will never be a leader of men, and neither do I want to be one, and neither do I want to be led. I thought: I want to lead only myself.”

— Patrick deWitt

6. “I lay in the dark thinking about the difficulties of family, how crazy and crooked the stories of a bloodline can be.”

— Patrick deWitt

7. “Where is your mother, Charlie asked. Dead. I’m sorry to hear that Thank you. But she was always dead.”

— Patrick deWitt

8. “I saw my bulky person in the windows of the passing storefronts and wondered, when will that man there find himself to be loved?”

— Patrick deWitt

9. “I could leave here and return to my hometown, but I would not return as the person I was when I left,’ he explained. ‘I would not recognize anyone. And no one would recognize me.”

— Patrick deWitt

10. “Hurried business is bad business.”

— Patrick deWitt

11. “He only wished to fight and cultivate an anger toward me, thus alleviating his guilt, but I would not abet him in this.”

— Patrick deWitt

12. “Here is another miserable mental image I will have to catalog and make room for.”

— Patrick deWitt

13. “We can all of us be hurt, and no one is exclusively safe from worry and sadness.”

— Patrick deWitt

14. “You put a wage behind something, it gives the act a sort of respectability.”

— Patrick deWitt

15. “Come with me into the world and reclaim your independence. You stand to gain so much, and riches are the least of it.”

— Patrick deWitt

16. “I look upon my past with disgrace. I was herded and instructed. But I will be herded and instructed no more. Today I am born anew, and my life will become my own again. It will be different ever after.”

— Patrick deWitt

17. “Luck was something you either earned or invented through strength of character. You had to come by it honestly; you could not trick or bluff your way into it.”

— Patrick deWitt

18. “This moment, this one position in time, was the happiest I will ever be as long as I am living. I have since felt it was too happy, that men are not meant to have access to this kind of satisfaction; certainly it has tempered every moment of happiness I have experienced since.”

— Patrick deWitt

19. “All you will get from me is death.”

— Patrick deWitt

20. “I sighed. ‘It doesn’t matter what we do. Money comes and goes.’ I shook my head. ‘It doesn’t matter and you know it doesn’t.”

— Patrick deWitt

21. “I thought, Perhaps a man is never meant to be truly happy. Perhaps there is no such a thing in our world, after all. As.”

— Patrick deWitt

22. “I do not know what it was about that boy but just looking at him, even I wanted to clout him on the head. It was a head that invited violence.”

— Patrick deWitt

23. “It occurred to him that, much in the way one experiences a brightening when walking beneath a cherry tree in bloom, so too did Klara generate and throw light.”

— Patrick deWitt

24. “He was a pile of American garbage and she feared she would love him forever.”

— Patrick deWitt

25. “A rooster stood before me in the road, looking for a fight; I tipped my hat to him and he scooted away over the puddles, all brawn and feathers and brainlessness.”

— Patrick deWitt

26. “You ask Raymond what he does for a living and he says, “I breathe and walk and when I’m told to sit I sit and when I’m told to leave I leave and return home to luxuriate and think of how much I despise them.”

— Patrick deWitt

27. “Returning his pen to its holder, he told us, ‘I will have him gutted with that scythe. I will hang him by his own intestines.’ At this piece of dramatic exposition, I could not hep but roll my eyes. A length of intestines would not carry the weight of a child, much less a full grown man.”

— Patrick deWitt

28. “Do you ever feel,” she asked, “that adulthood was thrust upon you at too young an age, and that you are still essentially a child mimicking the behaviors of the adults all around you in hopes they won’t discover the meager contents of your heart?”

— Patrick deWitt

29. “Susan thought of Malcolm as an exotic pet, a stopgap antidote to postcollege doldrums, but then something terrible happened, which was that she fell in love with him.”

— Patrick deWitt

30. “Work will drive you crazy if you let it.”

— Patrick deWitt

31. “It was faith that enabled him to do this, faith that every hurtling vehicle would elect to stop short of killing him.”

— Patrick deWitt

32. “I thought, When a man is properly drunk it is as though he is an a room by himself – there is a physical, impenetrable separation between him and his fellows.”

— Patrick deWitt

33. “I shall not sit idly by and settle for anything other than a perfect cup of tea.”

— Patrick deWitt

34. “Crossing the square at Saint-Sulpice, he split through a stream of nuns, who, as insects interrupted, lost the scent of their paths and spun away in eddies.”

— Patrick deWitt

35. “Price was never recognized for physical mayhem, but his dismissals were just the same as a wallop in the face.”

— Patrick deWitt

36. “I had nowhere to go and did not wish to be seen by anyone for fear they would recognize my sadness and so for several minutes I simply stood in the hall shifting my weight and breathing and attempting to clear my mind of every recognizable thought.”

— Patrick deWitt

37. “There is a feeling here, which if it gets you, will envenom your very center. It is a madness of possibilities.”

— Patrick deWitt

38. “I almost vomited in the boot! I was just about to vomit in the boot! Can you imagine how upset I would have been?”

— Patrick deWitt

39. “Who has died, and what was their purpose, and did they fulfill their potential?”

— Patrick deWitt

40. “She wasn’t precisely sure what she was walking toward but she wouldn’t have turned around for the world.”

— Patrick deWitt

41. “Frances was apologetic but immovable: she was engaging her crisis in full dramatic tilt and wanted, needed to face the limitless ocean with a terrific, stabbing pain in her heart. She asked Malcolm for his cash and he passed it over.”

— Patrick deWitt

42. “A man accepts an inferior cup of tea, telling himself it is only a small thing. But what comes next? Do you see?”

— Patrick deWitt

43. “You always bring God into arguments you know you’re losing, for the liar is lonely, and welcomes all manner of company.”

— Patrick deWitt

44. “Frances had come to think of gift-giving as a polite form of witchcraft.”

— Patrick deWitt

45. “It is true, I thought. I am living a life.”

— Patrick deWitt

46. “Why were you feeling low? Why does anyone? It creeps up on you from time to time.”

— Patrick deWitt

47. “Easier asked than answered,” said Mr. Olderglough. “For our days here are varied, and so our needs are also varied. On the whole, I think you’ll find the workload to be light in that you will surely have ample free time. But then there comes the question of what one does with his free time. I have occasionally felt that this was the most difficult part of the job; indeed, the most difficult part of being alive, wouldn’t you say, boy?”

— Patrick deWitt

48. “I find the constant upkeep of the body woefully fatiguing, don’t you?”

— Patrick deWitt

49. “My flesh and scalp started to ring and tingle and I became someone other than myself, or I became my second self, and this person was highly pleased to be stepping from the murk and into the living world where he might do just as he wished.”

— Patrick deWitt

50. “Let us look within ourselves and search out the dormant warrior.” “Mine is dormant to the point of non-existence, sir.”

— Patrick deWitt