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Book: The Rum Diary
Quotes of Book: The Rum Diary
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  1. Hunter S. Thompson _ The Rum Diary

    Listening to him, I realized how long it had been since I'd felt like I had the world by the balls, how many quick birthdays had gone by since that first year in Europe when I was so ignorant and so confident that every splinter of luck made me feel like a roaring champion.
    book-quote

  2. Hunter S. Thompson _ The Rum Diary

    Finally we came over a rise and I saw the Caribbean...My first feeling was a wild desire to drive a stake in the sand and claim the place for myself. The beach was white as salt, and cut off from the world by a ring of steep hills that faced the sea. We were on the edge of a large bay and the water was that clear, turquoise color that you get with a white sand bottom. I had never seen such a place. I wanted to take off all my clothes and never wear them again.
    book-quotepeacedesire

  3. Hunter S. Thompson _ The Rum Diary

    I was glad to be rid of him. He was one of those people who could go to New York and be "fascinating," but here in his own world he was just a cheap functionary, and a dull one at that.
    book-quoteirritatingposeurs

  4. Hunter S. Thompson _ The Rum Diary

    On the way down the hill we walked three abreast in the cobblestone street, drunk and laughing and talking like men who knew they would separate at dawn and travel to the far corners of the earth.
    book-quotejourneydrunkstroll

  5. Hunter S. Thompson _ The Rum Diary

    They claimed no allegiance to any flag and valued no currency but luck and good contacts.
    book-quoteluck

  6. Hunter S. Thompson _ The Rum Diary

    He talked about luck and fate and numbers coming up, yet he never ventured a nickel at the casinos because he knew the house had all the percentages. And beneath his pessimism, his bleak conviction that all the machinery was rigged against him, at the bottom of his soul was a faith that he was going to outwit it, that by carefully watching the signs he was going to know when to dodge and be spared. It was fatalism with a loophole, and all you had to do to make it work was never miss a sign. Survival by coordination, as it were. The race is not to the swift, nor the battle to the strong, but to those who can see it coming and jump aside. Like a frog evading a shillelagh in a midnight marsh.
    book-quotefateluckexistential

  7. Hunter S. Thompson _ The Rum Diary

    I was never idle long enough to do much thinking, but I felt somehow that my instincts were right. I shared a vagrant optimism that some of us were making real progress, that we had taken an honest road, and that the best of us would inevitably make it over the top.I shared a dark suspicion that the life we were leading was a lost cause, that we were all actors, kidding ourselves along on a senseless journey. It was the tension between these two poles--a restless idealism on one hand and a sense of impending doom on the other--that kept me going.
    book-quotefear

  8. Hunter S. Thompson _ The Rum Diary

    I harbor a secret urge to whack a salesman in the face, crack his teeth and put red bumps around his eyes.
    book-quote

  9. Hunter S. Thompson _ The Rum Diary

    I bought a small bottle of beer for fifteen cents and sat on a bench in the clearing, feeling like an old man. The scene I had just witnessed brought back a lot of memories - not of things I had done but of things I had failed to do, wasted hours and frustrated moments and opportunities forever lost because time had eaten so much of my life and I would never get it back.
    book-quote

  10. Hunter S. Thompson _ The Rum Diary

    All around us were people I had spent ten years avoiding--shapeless women in wool bathing suits, dull-eyed men with hairless legs and self-conscious laughs, all Americans, all fearsomely alike. These people should be kept at home, I thought; lock them in the basement of some goddamn Elks Club and keep them pacified with erotic movies; if they want a vacation, show them a foreign art film; and if they still aren't satisfied, send them into the wilderness and run them with vicious dogs.
    book-quotepeopleamericansexistential

  11. Hunter S. Thompson _ The Rum Diary

    Not much of what he said was original. What made him unique was the factthat he had no sense of detachment at all. He was like the fanatical football fan whoruns onto the field and tackles a player. He saw life as the Big Game, and the wholeof mankind was divided into two teams -- Sala's Boys, and The Others. The stakeswere fantastic and every play was vital -- and although he watched with a nearlyobsessive interest, he was very much the fan, shouting unheard advice in a crowd ofunheard advisors and knowing all the while that nobody was paying any attention tohim because he was not running the team and never would be. And like all fans hewas frustrated by the knowledge that the best he could do, even in a pinch, would beto run onto the field and cause some kind of illegal trouble, then be hauled off byguards while the crowd laughed."
    book-quote

  12. Hunter S. Thompson _ The Rum Diary

    Though I was careful never to mention it, I began to see a new dimension in everything that happened.
    book-quotevisionary
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