Top 100 Walter Tevis Quotes (2024 Update)
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51. “Beth was in high school now, and there was a chess club, but she did not belong. The boys in it were nonplused to have a Master walking the hallways, and they would stare at her in a kind of embarrassed awe when she passed.”

— Walter Tevis

52. “No one had come back by morning. She made scrambled eggs and ate them with two pieces of toast before having her first glass of wine. It was another sunny day. In the living room she found Vivaldi’s “The Four Seasons.” She put it on. Then she began drinking in earnest.”

— Walter Tevis

53. “Lately,’ she said, ‘I’ve been trying to memorize my life.”

— Walter Tevis

54. “What you know is not always important.”

— Walter Tevis

55. “After a moment a simple thought came to her: I’m not playing Benny Watts; I’m playing chess.”

— Walter Tevis

56. “He’s Fast Eddie. You’ve been hustled.”

— Walter Tevis

57. “She had heard of the genetic code that could shape an eye or hand from passing proteins. Deoxyribonucleic acid. It contained the entire set of instructions for constructing a respiratory system and a digestive one, as well as the grip of an infant’s hand. Chess was like that. The geometry of a position could be read and reread and not exhausted of possibility. You saw deeply into the layer of it, but there was another layer beyond that, and another, and another.”

— Walter Tevis

58. “U-10 had been before the 1980s Decade of Enlightenment, the University of Tennessee – the 1980s had held no illusions what was important to the American way of life- and they landed their little olive drab plastic craft in front of the library.”

— Walter Tevis

59. “Beth never participated in these conversations; she already was what she wanted to be.”

— Walter Tevis

60. “Someone had left a lipstick on the back of the toilet. She went to the bathroom and studying herself in the mirror, reddened her lips carefully. She had never worn lipstick before. She was beginning to feel very good.”

— Walter Tevis

61. “Holy Bible begins: ‘In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth.’ It does not give the century of the ‘beginning,’ nor is it clear who ‘God’ is, or was. I am not certain whether Holy Bible is a book of history or maintenance or poetry. It names many strange people who do not seem real.”

— Walter Tevis

62. “When they were gone Spofforth sat at his desk for a while, wondering about the news of the man who said he could read. He had heard of reading often enough when he was young, and knew that it had died out long before. He had seen books – very ancient things. There were still a few of them left undestroyed in the University Library.”

— Walter Tevis

63. “The waitress who handed her a menu was dressed in a black miniskirt and fishnet hose, but she had the face of a geometry teacher.”

— Walter Tevis

64. “How human he had become, to rationalize that way! He blamed her for his going native and becoming obsessed with vague guilts and vaguer doubts. She had taught him to drink gin; and she had shown him an aspect of strong and comfortable and hedonistic and unthinking humanity that his fifteen years of studying television had left him unaware of.”

— Walter Tevis

65. “After a moment he said, ‘The teaching of reading is a crime. You could be sent to prison for it.”

— Walter Tevis

66. “Beth walked slowly home and replayed the game. Her mind was as lucid as a perfect, stunning diamond.”

— Walter Tevis

67. “Beth was White, and she played pawn to king four, hoping for the Sicilian. She knew the Sicilian better than anything else. But Klein played pawn to king four and then fianchettoed his king’s bishop, setting it over in the corner above his castled king. She wasn’t quite sure but thought this was the kind of opening called “Irregular.”

— Walter Tevis

68. “Someone had said that when computers really learned to play chess and played against one another, White would always win because of the first move. Like tick-tack-toe.”

— Walter Tevis

69. “Openings.” He did not look at her; he was watching the board. “Is it?” He shrugged. “The Queen’s Gambit.”

— Walter Tevis

70. “The thought of picking up the phone and calling someone seemed distant now. There was a barrier between herself and whatever world the phone would attach her to; she could not penetrate the barrier.”

— Walter Tevis

71. “You Americans did not create that oil you used for your cars, your air conditioners, your lawn mowers, or for the plastic films you wrapped toys and pens and vegetables in. The oil was made by the world itself, when great ferns covered Texas and the Persian Gulf. It took millions of years to make it. You and the Arabs threw it away in a century.”

— Walter Tevis

72. “The truth of it is there’s nothing first-class made in America except television and French fries.”

— Walter Tevis

73. “I didn’t see what he was doing,” Beth said, picturing the move where his queen took her pawn. It was like putting your tongue against an aching tooth.”

— Walter Tevis

74. “It would be nice to have a cheeseburger. She laughed wryly at herself; a cheeseburger was what an American of a type she thought she would never be craved when travelling abroad.”

— Walter Tevis

75. “Do you still like my hair?”

— Walter Tevis

76. “Reading is too intimate,′ Spofforth said. ‘It will put you too close to the feelings and ideas of others. It will disturb and confuse you.”

— Walter Tevis

77. “Suddenly everyone was quiet, and they all began to look at Beth. She felt rising in her a hatred as black as night.”

— Walter Tevis

78. “You’ve got to get your ass moving, girl,” Jolene said. “You got to quit sitting in your own funk.”

— Walter Tevis

79. “It was a beautiful day, with fresh leaves on the trees and an impeccably blue sky. She felt herself expand, relax, open up. She was going to beat him. She was going to beat him soundly. The continuation she found on the nineteenth move was a beautiful and subtle wonder. It sprang to her mind full-blown, with half a dozen moves as clear as if they were projected on a screen in front of her, her rook, bishop and knight dancing together down in his king’s corner of the board.”

— Walter Tevis

80. “Everything he was doing was obvious, unimaginative, bureaucratic.”

— Walter Tevis

81. “It changed the life of mankind more radically than the printing press. It created suburbs and a hundred other dependencies – sexual and economic and narcotic – upon the automobile.”

— Walter Tevis

82. “For a moment she wanted to say something about the expensiveness of room service, even measured in pesos, but she didn’t. She picked up the phone and dialed six. The man answered in English. She told him to send a margarita and a large Coke to 713.”

— Walter Tevis

83. “In her room that night she could not get to sleep because of the way the games kept playing themselves over and over in her head long after she had stopped enjoying them.”

— Walter Tevis

84. “It’s not luck – there’s probably no such thing as luck, and if there is you can’t depend on it. All you can do is play the percentages, play your best game, and when the critical bet comes – in every money game there is always a critical bet – you hold your stomach tight and you push hard. That’s the clutch. And that’s where your born loser loses.”

— Walter Tevis

85. “Whatever may happen to me, thank God that I can read, that I have truly touched the minds of other men.”

— Walter Tevis

86. “She felt in herself an inexhaustible ability to find strong, threatening moves.”

— Walter Tevis

87. “A pool hustler had to do what he claimed to be able to do. The risks he took were not underwritten. His skill on the arena of green cloth – cloth that itself was the color of money – could never be only pretense.”

— Walter Tevis

88. “Her mind was luminous, and her soul sang to her in the sweet moves of chess.”

— Walter Tevis

89. “But when he was a mile from the town, walking through a barren field, toward the low hills where his camp was, all of it suddenly came over him in one crushing shock – the strangeness of it, the danger, the pain and worry in his body – and he fell to the ground and lay there, his body and his mind crying out against the violence that was being done to them by this most foreign, most strange and alien of all places.”

— Walter Tevis

90. “Perhaps the grimness and coldness that I see everywhere exist because there are no children. No one is young anymore. In my whole life I have never seen anyone younger than I am. My only idea of childhood comes from memory, and from the obscene charade of those robot children at the zoo. I must be at least thirty. When my child comes he will have no playmates. He will be alone in a world of old and tired people who have lost the gift for living.”

— Walter Tevis

91. “She had three thousand dollars in her savings account; she was no longer a virgin; and she knew how to drink.”

— Walter Tevis

92. “What if she had already done it to herself? What if she had shaved away from the surface of her brain whatever synaptic interlacings had formed her gift? She remembered reading somewhere that some pop artist once bought an original drawing by Michelangelo – and had taken a piece of art gum and erased it, leaving blank paper. The waste had shocked her. Now she felt a similar shock as she imagined the surface of her own brain with the talent for chess wiped away.”

— Walter Tevis

93. “She could do her own training. She had been training alone for months. She finished off the last of her coffee. She had been training alone for most of her life.”

— Walter Tevis

94. “Eddie Felson, with the ball bearings in his elbow, with eyes for the green and the colored balls, for the shiny balls, the purple, orange, blue and red, the stripes and solids, with geometrical rolls and falling, lovely spinning, with whiffs and clicks and tap-tap-taps, with scrapings of chalk, and the fingers embracing the polished shaft, the fingers on felt, the ever and always ready arena, the long, bright rectangle. The rectangle of lovely, mystical green, the color of money.”

— Walter Tevis

95. “It feels terrible. Being in love feels terrible. I.”

— Walter Tevis

96. “What she did was at bottom shockingly trivial, but the energy of her amazing mind crackled in the room for those who knew how to listen.”

— Walter Tevis

97. “There was a certain relief in seeing him make the move. She had been forced to consider several other replies; now the lines from them could be dropped from her mind.”

— Walter Tevis

98. “My upbringing, like that of all the other members of my Thinker Class, had made me into an unimaginative, self-centered, drug-addicted fool. Until learning how to read I had lived in a whole underpopulated world of self-centered, drug-addicted fools, all of us living by our Rules of Privacy in some crazy dream of Self-Fulfillment.”

— Walter Tevis

99. “Do you do problems?” “No.” She had tried a few as a child, but they did not interest her. The positions did not look natural. White to move and mate in two. It was, as Mrs. Wheatley would have said, irrelevant.”

— Walter Tevis

100. “The face on the box was, Paul had told me, the face of Jesus Christ. It was used to sell a lot of things. ‘Vestigial reverence’ was the term Paul read somewhere that was supposed to be the idea, probably a hundred or more blues ago, when such things were all planned out.”

— Walter Tevis