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John Fante citations

John Fante, né le 8 avril 1909 à Denver et mort le 8 mai 1983 à Los Angeles , est un romancier, nouvelliste et scénariste américain. Wikipedia  

✵ 8. avril 1909 – 8. mai 1983  •  Autres noms جان فانته, Џон Фанте, جون فانتي, ჯონ ფანტე
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John Fante: 116 citations0 J'aime

John Fante citations célèbres

“Elle me lança le gant au visage. "Gibier de potence!" dit elle. "Petit malfrat!"
Elle fit demi-tour et m'abandonna à mon sort. Je me séchai, enfilai un caleçon et entrai dans la cuisine. Elle était devant la cuisinière, le dos tourné, en train de préparer mon petit-déjeuner. L'expert des appendices charnus que je suis détecta aussitôt la contraction de ses fessiers - signe indubitable de fureur chez une femme. L'expérience m'a appris à me montrer extrêmement prudent en présence d'une métamorphose aussi spectaculaire des fessiers féminins, si bien que je m'assis sans moufter. J'avais l'impression d'affronter un serpent lové sur lui-même.”

John Fante livre Dreams from Bunker Hill

Dreams from Bunker Hill

“Maintenant je le savais, maintenant j'allais le faire. Je suis remonté là-haut en courant, avec la bouteille d'eau bénite, un idiot muni d'eau bénite, je le savais, je savais que j'étais idiot, mais je m'en moquais.
Je devais les avertir de mon arrivée. Je devais au moins les prévenir, ils avaient droit à ça.
J'ai gueulé : "Eau bénite!"
"L'eau bénite arrive!"
"Voilà l'eau bénite!"
Quand je me suis rué dans l'entrée de la mine, ils étaient tous immobiles sur le sol, blancs et nus et paralysés, figés comme de blâmes cadavres.
"Attention à l'eau bénite! Voici l'homme qui détient l'eau bénite! Un truc super puissant!"
J'ai ai éclaboussé un peu partout, elle glougloutait hors de la bouteille en giclant sur leurs cadavres blancs. "C'est l'eau bénite, les amis! Un truc super-puissant!" Sur leurs visages, leurs poitrines, leurs parties poilues, jeter l'eau bénite, chasser le diable, tuer le diable, sauver mon père, libérer mon père!”

John Fante

L'Orgie

“Donna Tosacana était devenue une femme imposante, toujours vêtue de noir depuis la mort de son mari. Sous la soie noire extérieure, elle portait des jupons, quatre jupons aux couleurs vives. Ses chevilles enflées ressemblaient à des goitres. Ses minuscules chaussures paraissaient prêtes à éclater sous la pression de ses cente vingt-cinq kilos. Une douzaine de seins superposés semblaient s'écraser sur sa poitrine. Elle était bâtie comme une pyramide, sans hanches. Ses bras étaient si charnus qu'ils ne tombaient pas à la verticale, mais faisaient un angle avec son corps; ses doigts enrobés de graisse évoquaient des saucisses. Elle n'avait quasiment pas de cou. Quand elle tournait la tête, les bourrelets de chair se déplaçaient avec la lenteur mélancolique de la cire molle. On voyait son crâne rose à travers ses cheveux blancs clairsemés. Son nez était mince et exquis, mais ses yeux évoquaient deux raisins noirs écrasés. Dès qu'elle parlait, ses fausses dents jacassaient dans l'idiome qui leur était propre.”

John Fante

Wait Until Spring, Bandini

John Fante: Citations en anglais

“Arturo Bandini: -What does happiness mean to you Camilla?
Camilla: -That you can fall in love with whoever you want to,
and not feel ashamed of it.”

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John Fante livre Ask the Dust

Source: Ask the Dust

“The trouble with trouble was that trouble was looking for Coldwater Gatling. They don't like Texas Rangers down in Arizona, consequently Coldwater Gatling figured shoot first and find out who you killed afterwards. That's how they did it in the Lone Star State where men were men and the women didn't mind cooking for hard-riding straight-shooting people like Coldwater Gatling, the toughest man in leather they had down there.”

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John Fante livre Ask the Dust

Ask the Dust (1939)

“The desert was always there, a patient white animal, waiting for men to die, for civilizations to flicker and pass into the darkness…All the evil of the world seemed not evil at all, but inevitable and good and part of that endless struggle to keep the desert down.”

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John Fante livre Ask the Dust

Source: Ask the Dust (1939), Chapter Fourteen

“"Forgive my body!" she said. She put her arms out to me, the tears flowing down her cheeks. "Think of my soul!" she said. "My soul is so beautiful, it can bring you so much! It is not ugly like my flesh!"”

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John Fante livre Ask the Dust

Ask the Dust (1939)

“Almighty God, I am sorry I am now an atheist, but have You read Nietzsche?”

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John Fante livre Ask the Dust

Source: Ask the Dust

“You are nobody, and I might have been somebody, and the road to each of us is love.”

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John Fante livre Ask the Dust

Source: Ask the Dust

“Los Angeles, give me some of you! Los Angeles come to me the way I came to you, my feet over your streets, you pretty town I loved you so much, you sad flower in the sand, you pretty town.”

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John Fante livre Ask the Dust

Ask the Dust (1939)

“I have wanted women whose very shoes are worth all I have ever possessed.”

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John Fante livre Ask the Dust

Source: Ask the Dust

“I felt his hot tears and the loneliness of man and the sweetness of all men and the aching haunting beauty of the living”

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John Fante livre Full of Life

Source: Full of Life

“Nor did he give a damn for the world either, or the universe, or heaven or hell. But he liked women.”

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John Fante livre The Brotherhood of the Grape

Source: The Brotherhood of the Grape (1977)
Contexte: Nobody crossed him without a battle. He disliked almost everything, particularly his wife, his children, his neighbors, his church, his priest, his town, his state, his country, and the country from which he emigrated. Nor did he give a damn for the world either, or the sun or the stars, or the universe, or heaven or hell. But he liked women.

“Ah, Los Angeles! Dust and fog of your lonely streets. I am no longer lonely. Just you wait, all of you ghosts of this room, just you wait, because it will happen yet, and that Camilla, she can have her Sammy in the desert, with his cheap short stories and stinking prose, but wait until she has a taste of me, because it will happen, as sure as there's a God in heaven.”

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John Fante livre Ask the Dust

Source: Ask the Dust (1939)

“I was twenty then. What the hell, I used to say, take your time, Bandini. You got ten years to write a book, so take it easy, get out and learn about life, walk the streets. That’s your trouble: your ignorance of life.”

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John Fante livre Ask the Dust

Source: Ask the Dust

“Ask the dust on the road! Ask the Joshua trees standing alone where the Mojave begins. Ask them about Camilla Lopez, and they will whisper her name.”

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John Fante

Source: The Big Hunger

“Far down the street I saw the building where Vera lived. Hanging from the wall, like a man crucified, was the bed.”

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John Fante livre Ask the Dust

Source: Ask the Dust (1939), Chapter Twelve

“She kissed me, author of The Little Dog Laughed. Then she took my wrist with her two hands. She pressed her lips into the palm of my hand. She placed my hand upon her bosom between her breasts. She turned her lips toward my face and waited. And Arturo Bandini, the great author dipped deep into his colorful imagination, romantic Arturo Bandini, just chock-full of clever phrases, and he said, weakly, kittenishly, "Hello."”

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John Fante livre Ask the Dust

Ask the Dust (1939)

“Another magazine wanted the Long Lost Hills in digest form. A hundred dollars. I was rich again. A time for amends, for righting the past. I sent my mother five dollars.”

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John Fante livre Ask the Dust

Ask the Dust (1939)

“I sat smiling wretchedly, my heart weeping for The Little Dog Laughed, for every well-turned phrase, for the little flecks of poetry through it, my first story, the best thing I could show for my whole life. It was the record of all that was good in me, approved and printed by the great J. C. Hackmuth, and she had torn it up and thrown it into a spittoon.”

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John Fante livre Ask the Dust

Ask the Dust (1939)

“I tossed my shoulders and swaggered away, whistling with pleasure. In the gutter I saw a long cigaret butt. I picked it up without shame, lit it as I stood with one foot in the gutter, puffed it and exhaled toward the stars. I was an American, and goddamn proud of it. This great city, these mighty pavements and proud buildings, they were the voice of my America. From sand and cactus we Americans had carved an empire. Camilla's people had had their chance. They had failed. We Americans had turned the trick. Thank God for my country. Thank God I had been born an American!”

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John Fante livre Ask the Dust

Source: Ask the Dust (1939), Chapter Five

“I looked down at the poor calf. Its hide was spotted black and white and it had the most delicate ankles. From the slightly open mouth there appeared a pink tongue. I closed my eyes and ran out of Hellfrick's room and threw myself on the floor in my room. I lay there and shuddered, thinking of the old cow alone in the field in the moonlight, old cow mooing for her calf. Murder!”

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John Fante livre Ask the Dust

Source: Ask the Dust (1939), Chapter Thirteen

“Mr. Hellfrick was an atheist, retired from the army, living on a meager pension, scarcely enough to pay his liquor bills, even though he purchased the cheapest gin on the market. He lived perpetually in a grey bathrobe without a cord or button, and though he made a pretense at modesty he really didn't care, so that his bathrobe was always open and you saw much hair and bones underneath.”

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John Fante livre Ask the Dust

Ask the Dust (1939)

“I didn't care. It was better to be a live coward than a dead madman. These people walking in and out of huge concrete buildings--someone should warn them. It would come again…Los Angeles was doomed. It was a city with a curse upon it.”

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John Fante livre Ask the Dust

Ask the Dust (1939)

“I drew my hands over her belly and legs, felt my own desire, searched foolishly for my passion, strained for it while she waited, rolled and tore my hair and begged for it, but there was none, there was none at all, only the retreat to Hackmuth's letter and thoughts that remained to be written, but no lust, only fear of her, and shame and humiliation.”

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John Fante livre Ask the Dust

Source: Ask the Dust (1939), Chapter Nine

“those huaraches--do you have to wear them, Camilla? Do you have to emphasize the fact that you always were and always will be a filthy little Greaser?”

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John Fante livre Ask the Dust

Ask the Dust (1939)

“You try so hard to be an American," I said. "why do you do that? Take a look at yourself"…"And all that paint on your face. You look awful--a cheap imitation of an American. You look frowsy. If I were a Mexican I'd knock your head off. You're a disgrace to your people.”

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John Fante livre Ask the Dust

Ask the Dust (1939)

“Write her a poem, spill your heart to her in sweet cadences; but I didn't know how to write poetry. It was love and dove with me, bad rhymes, blundering sentiment. Oh Christ in Heaven, I'm no writer: I can't even put down a little quatrain. I'm no good in this world. I stood at the window and waved my hands at the sky; no good at all, just a cheap fake; neither writer nor lover; neither fish nor fowl.”

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John Fante livre Ask the Dust

Ask the Dust (1939)

“It crept upon me--the restlessness, the loneliness. What was the matter…Then it came to me like crashing and thunder, like death and destruction. I got up from the counter and walked away in fear, walking fast down the boardwalk, passing people who seemed strange and ghostly: the world seemed a myth, a transparent plane, and all things upon it were here for only a little while…”

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John Fante livre Ask the Dust

Ask the Dust (1939)

“"Maybe this isn't coffee at all," I said. "Maybe it's just water after they boiled your filthy shoes in it." I looked up to her black blazing eyes. "Maybe you don't know any better. Maybe you're just naturally careless. But if I were a girl I wouldn't be seen in a Main Street alley with those shoes."”

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John Fante livre Ask the Dust

Ask the Dust (1939)

“Suddenly she laughed again. It was a shriek, a mad laugh like the clatter of dishes and it was over as quickly as it began. I looked at her feet again. I could feel something inside her retreating. I wanted to hurt her.”

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John Fante livre Ask the Dust

Ask the Dust (1939)

“I don't remember what I did after I left her. Maybe I went up to Benny Cohen's room over the Grand Central Market. He had a wooden leg with a little door in it. Inside the door were marijuana cigarets.”

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John Fante livre Ask the Dust

Source: Ask the Dust (1939), Chapter Four

“I went up to my room, up the dusty stairs of Bunker Hill, past the soot-covered frame buildings along that dark street, sand and oil and grease choking the futile palm trees standing like dying prisoners, chained to a little plot of ground with black pavement hiding their feet. Dust and old buildings and old people sitting at windows, old people tottering out of doors, old people moving painfully along the dark street. The old folk from Indiana and Iowa and Illinois, from Boston and Kansas City and Des Moines, they sold their homes and their stores, and they came here by train and by automobile to the land of sunshine, to die in the sun, with just enough money to live until the sun killed them, tore themselves out by the roots in their last days, deserted the smug prosperity of Kansas City and Chicago and Peoria to find a place in the sun. And when they got here they found that other and greater thieves had already taken possession, that even the sun belonged to the others; Smith and Jones and Parker, druggist, banker, baker, dust of Chicago and Cincinnati and Cleveland on their shoes, doomed to die in the sun, a few dollars in the bank, enough to subscribe to the Los Angeles Times, enough to keep alive the illusion that this was paradise, that their little papier-mâché homes were castles. The uprooted ones, the empty sad folks, the old and the young folks, the folks from back home. These were my countrymen, these were the new Californians. With their bright polo shirts and sunglasses, they were in paradise, they belonged.”

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John Fante livre Ask the Dust

Ask the Dust (1939)

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