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The Last Days of Ptolemy Grey

Walter Mosley

Top 10 Best Quotes

“That's how powerful you are, girl...You pretty, but pretty alone is not what people see. You the kinda pretty, the kinda beauty, that's like a mirror. Men and women see themselves in you, only now they so beautiful that they can't bear to see you go.”

“The older you get the more you live in the past”

“We born dyin'...But you ask a man an' he talk like he gonna live forevah.”

“The great man say that life is pain," Coydog had said over eighty-five years before. "That mean if you love life, then you love the hurt come along wit' it. Now, if that ain't the blues, I don't know what is.”

“There are times in your life when things line up and Fate takes a hand in your future," Ptolemy remembered Coydog saying. "When that happens, you got to move quick and take advantage of the sitchiation or you'll never know what might have been." "How do I know when it's time to move quick?" L'il Pea asked. "When somethin' big happens and then somethin' else come up.”

“That’s how Ptolemy imagined the disposition of his memories, his thoughts: they were still his, still in the range of his thinking, but they were, many and most of them, locked on the other side a closed door that he’s lost the key for. So his memory became like secrets held away from his own mind. But these secrets were noisy things; they babbled and muttered behind the door, and so if he listened closely he might catch a snatch of something he once knew well.”

“When you get old you begin to understand that no one talks unless someone listens, and no one knows nuthin' less somebody else can understand.”

“Trustin’ a woman is like walkin’ in California,” Coydog would say. “You know there’s bound to be a quake sometimes but you just keep on walkin’ anyways. What else could you do?”

“There was something about his grandfather's death, about men who love their sons . . .”

“Money ain’t the root of all evil,” Coydog had told the boy Li’l Pea, “but it get a hold on some people like vines on a tree or the smell’a fungus on damp sheets. They’s some people need money before love or laughter. All you can do is feel sorry for someone like that.”

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Book Keywords:

memories, kindness, compassion, walter-mosley, the-last-days-of-ptolemy-grey, love, inner-beauty, life, last-days-of-ptolemy-grey, forgetting, blues, death-and-dying, thoughts, living

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