inspo/dialogue
Sally Rooney,
Rachel Kushner,
Shirley Hazzard,
Jonathan Franzen,
Jennifer Egan,
Raymond Carver,
Nick Hornby,
Viet Thanh Nguyen,
Annie Proulx
good dialogue, with or without quotation marks
"Why is nobody ordering country ribs?" Denise asked Rob Zito. "Why are the waiters not pushing my phenomenally delicious and unusual country ribs?"
"Americans don't like sauerkraut," Zito said.
"The hell they don't. I've seen my reflection in the plates coming back when people order it. I've counted my eyelashes."
"It's possible we get some German nationals in here," Zito said. "German passport-holders may be responsible for those clean plates."
"Is it possible you don't like sauerkraut yourself?"
"It's an interesting food," Zito said.
'Why did she leave you?'
'Because I became a bore and a fool too. But I wasn't born one, Henry. You created me. She wouldn't leave you, so I became a bore, boring her with complaints and jealousy.'
He said, 'People have a great opinion of your books.'
'And they say you're a first-class chairman. What the hell does our work matter?'
He said sadly, 'I don't know anything else that does,' looking up at the grey cumulus passing above the south bank. The gulls flew low over the barges and the shot-tower stood black in the winter light among the ruined warehouses. The man who fed the sparrows had gone and the woman with the brown-paper parcel, the fruit-sellers cried like animals in the dusk outside the station. It was as if the shutters were going up on the whole world; soon we should all of us be abandoned to our own devices. 'I wondered why you hadn't been to see us all that time,' Henry said.
</3
“I never met a girl who rides Italian motorcycles,” he said. “It’s like you aren’t real.”
He looked at my helmet, gloves, my motorcycle key, on his bureau. The room seemed to hold its breath, the motel curtain sucked against the glass by the draft of a partly opened window, a strip of sun wavering underneath the curtain’s hem, the light-blocking fabric holding back the outside world.
He said he wished he could see me do my run, but he was stuck at the motel, retiling a rotten shower.
“It’s okay,” I said. I was relieved. I felt sure that this interlude, my night in Stretch’s bed, shouldn’t overlap with my next destination.
“Do you think you might come through here?” he asked. “I mean, ever again?”
I looked at the crates of tools and the jumbled stack of the owner’s son’s bicycle collection, some of them in good condition and others rusted skeletons with fused chains, perhaps saved simply because he had ample storage space in poor Stretch’s room. I thought about Stretch having to sit in a parking lot all night instead of lie in his own bed, and I swear, I almost decided to sleep with him. I saw our life, Stretch done with a day’s work, covered with plaster dust, or clean, pulling tube socks up over his long, tapered calves. The little episodes of rudeness and grace he’d been dealt and then would replay in miniature with me.
I stood up and collected my helmet and gloves and said I probably wouldn’t be back anytime soon. And then I hugged him, said thanks.
He said he might need to go take another shower, a cold one, and somehow the comment was sweet instead of distasteful.
Later, what I remembered most was the way he’d said my name. He said it like he believed he knew me.
awww this is cute
“When I got out, I thought, okay, unlike a lot of my friends, I know what the inside of a prison is like. Most people don’t even know what the outside of a prison is like. They’re kept so out of sight. You only know signs on the highway warning you in certain areas not to pick up hitchers. While I know about confinement and boredom and midnight fire drills. Amplified orders banging around the prison yard like the evening prayer call from the mosques along Atlantic Avenue. I know pimento loaf. Powdered eggs. Riots. The experience of being hosed down with bleach and disinfectant like a garbage can. I know about an erotics of necessity.”
“Oh, baby,” the Duke of Earle said.
“There’s something in that. You think you’re one way — you know, strictly into women. But it turns out you’re into making do.”
“I am going to melt,” the duke said, “just puddle right in this booth. I had no idea—”
“I don’t want to disappoint you, Duke,” the friend said, “but I’d have to be in prison, and I don’t plan on going back.”
i love the vivid emotion conveyed in the duke's lines
“[...] He’s calling to those rabbits like they know their names and are going to be happy to see him. I’m thinking, isn’t he amazed by how quickly I got here? Isn’t he going to at least mention it? I was redlining his Jaguar. I pissed in a Dr Pepper bottle. When it was full I pissed in a potato chips bag. I broke the law. Gave up a night’s sleep. Forwent the tube socks at the truck stop.”
“Incredible self-control,” Sandro said.
“All in the name of doing Saul a favor. I mean, you try to help a person. He opens the car door and leans in the back and makes this sound. A wailing. High-pitched.”
“Oh, no,” Sandro said, and put his hands over his face, feigning a brace for disaster.
“Yeah, that’s right. Those goddamn rabbits were dead.”
“You forgot to check on them.”
“My job was transport. And I didn’t hear any complaints from back there. But I had the windows down and there was a lot of truck traffic — especially on the 10. I don’t know what happened. They just… died.”
incredible story
It was late and dark and smoky at Rudy’s. The booth had broken into several conversations, Ronnie next to Saul Oppler, who had fully forgiven him for killing his rabbits. Ronnie was looking at Saul’s hands. “Saul,” he said, “you have no fingerprints.” Saul looked at his own hands, old and giant and strong, hands that looked like they could pulverize rocks. He examined his smooth fingerpads and shrugged. He said he used his hands. To make paintings. Just worked the prints right off, he said.
Ronnie said he never knew it could be that easy.
“What do you mean, easy?” Saul said. “I’ve been in the studio for forty-eight years. You call that easy?”
“I meant getting rid of your—”
“I didn’t get my first solo show until I was thirty-seven years old! Easy. To hell with it,” Saul said.
this is hilarious cus it's soon after Ronnie has told a story about his brother burning off his fingerprints at the age of 18
(dialogue inspo: no adjectives, the emotion clearly visible through the speech itself)
His father had said to him, “As you get older, you tolerate less and less well women your own age.” “You mean you do,” Sandro had said. “Yes, I,” his father said. “That’s right. And I used to think it was because I’d escaped time and women didn’t. But that’s not the reason. It’s because I’m stunted. Many men are. If you are that kind of man when you grow up, Sandro, you’ll understand. You’ll go younger in order to tolerate yourself.”
That’s what it was about, at the end of the day. His father was right. It’s what you can stand of yourself.
brutal
The mother said, “Aldred has a tender heart.”
The youth blushed. “Not tender enough, perhaps.”
Raimonda pushed a fugitive pea in his direction. “Tender enough. But reluctant to show.”
And this was a girl he had kissed with abandon.
“One was raised that way. Schools strict. Parents not demonstrative.” He hoped to end the discussion by eating a whole handful of peas.
Raimonda said, “That was their affair. Now it’s up to you.” The tone in which she said this, without rigour or rancour; almost in reverie.
She flicked the half-smoked cigarette into the pool. It floated for a second, then sank. She said, I don’t like facts.
Danny: I don’t like nouns. Or verbs. And adjectives are the worst.
Nora: No, adverbs are the worst. He said brightly. She thought hopefully.
Danny: She moaned helplessly.
Nora: He ran stiffly.
Danny: Is that why you’re here? To get away from all the adverbs back in New York?
Who says I’m from New York?
Aren’t you?
Nora cocked her head. Short-term memory problems?
Oh, yeah. Facts.
Nora: Anyway, there’s no getting away from adverbs. They’re rampant.
Danny: She confessed anxiously.
Nora: They’re in our heads.
She cried desperately.
Nora: I hope you don’t actually write like that.
Danny: I write for shit.
Nora: I’m an excellent writer.
She said smugly.
Nora: Not smugly. Factually.
Danny: Ah. So you’ll make an exception to brag.
kinda cute
She turns to me, and I swear to God her eyes are bugging half out of her head. Are you aware, she says, that every question you ask is costing the taxpayer money? Those two guards outside the door, how much you think they’re getting paid? We’re turning people away downstairs because they don’t have insurance, and you robbers and rapists and murderers are lying around here being treated like kings. I don’t get it.
I try again. But the operation—
They should have a meter running right next to your bed, she says. Just so you can see the burden you are. Then maybe you’d give me a peaceful minute to do my work.
Is it the same as the last oper—
That’s fifteen dollars.
Or is it something—
Another fifteen. You’re up to thirty.
I stare at her. My head is starting to fog up. I say, Are you seriously asking me for money?
Angela looks behind her, realizing all of a sudden that this doesn’t look too good. I don’t hear you, she says, and starts to hum. She hums and hums. I try to talk, but all she does is hum.
so sad