Quotes from book
Barbary Shore

Barbary Shore
Norman Mailer

Barbary Shore is Norman Mailer's second published novel, written after Mailer's great success with his 1948 debut The Naked and the Dead. It concerns a protagonist who rents a room in a Brooklyn boarding house with the intention of writing a novel. Wounded during World War II, he is an amnesiac, and much of his past is a secret to himself. After Rinehart & Company published the novel in 1951, it received poor reviews and sold poorly. The failure of Barbary Shore and only moderate success of Mailer's next novel, The Deer Park triggered a decade-long hiatus from the novel by Mailer, which ended with the publication of An American Dream in 1965.

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“I ask, "Would You agree that sex is where philosophy begins?" But God, who is the oldest of the philosophers, answers in his weary cryptic way, "Rather think of Sex as Time, and Time as the connection of new circuits."”

Norman Mailer book Barbary Shore

Source: Barbary Shore (1951), Ch. 28

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“What were the phenomena of the world today? If I knew little else, I knew the answer — war, and the preparations for new war.”

Norman Mailer book Barbary Shore

Michael Lovett, in Ch. 18
Barbary Shore (1951)

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“He was a fool — a brilliant man and I loved his beard, and there was the mountain ax in his brain, and all the blood poured out, and he could not see the Mexican sun. Your people raised the ax, and the last blood of revolutionary mankind, his poor blood, ran into the carpet.”

Norman Mailer book Barbary Shore

Lannie Madison, on the assassination of Leon Trotsky, in Ch. 21
Barbary Shore (1951)

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“There was that law of life so cruel and so just which demanded that one must grow or else pay more for remaining the same.”

Norman Mailer book Barbary Shore

Source: Barbary Shore (1951), Ch. 26

Norman Mailer photo

“The essence of spirit, he thought to himself, was to choose the thing which did not better one's position but made it more perilous. That was why the world he knew was poor, for it insisted morality and caution were identical.”

Norman Mailer book Barbary Shore

Source: Barbary Shore (1951), Ch. 18

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“Somerset Maugham … wrote somewhere that "Nobody is any better than he ought to be." … I carried it along with me as a working philosophy, but I suppose that finally I would have to take exception to the thought … or else the universe is just an elaborate clock.”

Norman Mailer book Barbary Shore

Source: Barbary Shore (1951), Ch. 10

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“The manuscript lay like a dust-rag on his desk, and Eitel found, as he had found before, that the difficulty of art was that it forced a man back on his life, and each time the task was more difficult and distasteful.”

Norman Mailer book Barbary Shore

Source: Barbary Shore (1951), Ch. 14

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“There was never a revolution to equal it, and never a city more glorious than Petrograd, and for all that period of my life I lived another and braved the ice of winter and the summer flies in Vyborg while across my adopted country of the past, winds of the revolution blew their flame, and all of us suffered hunger while we drank at the wine of equality.”

Norman Mailer book Barbary Shore

Michael Lovett, in Ch. 14
Barbary Shore (1951)

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“Revolutions are the periods of history when individuals count most.”

Norman Mailer book Barbary Shore

McLeod, in Ch. 29
Barbary Shore (1951)

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“The storm approaches its thunderhead, and it is apparent that the boat drifts ever closer to shore. So the blind will lead the blind, and the deaf shout warnings to one another until their voices are lost.”

Norman Mailer book Barbary Shore

Michael Lovett, in Ch. 33
Barbary Shore (1951)

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