Padgett Powell Quotes

We lived on the Key West Army Base. Key West for me was a tropical island paradise.

The thing to remember about Phuket is it's very beach-oriented and relaxed. The trendiest beach is Koh Sirey, which is full of groovy places to have a cocktail and watch the sun go down.

In L.A., it's very hard to have some kind of conscience of some style out there. The weather's too hot; there's no seasons.

I go to Florida sometimes for vacation. I actually really like Florida. It's a weird place, it's surreal. It's so close, but you feel like you're in another world or on an island.

On the West Coast, things are more relaxed, maybe because people have more fun outdoors. In the East, where the weather is not so good, people have to stay indoors. They're very knowledgable fans. This makes you play even harder.

I miss the Bay Area - the kind of laid-back lifestyle. Because in Hong Kong, you're going, like, 90 miles an hour, which is fun when you're young.

People in England have a lot of respect. It is relaxed here.

New Zealand is such a down-to-earth place.

I really, really loved Fair Isle. I'd always wanted to go there. It's so beautiful and a very small but very international community. Every nationality that you can imagine have settled there.

My perfect beach town isn't a fancy resort or glitzy planned community. It's a place with a hometown grocery that has decent meat, seafood, and a deli; a couple of ice cream shops; and a handful of good restaurants - where the island-wide dress code is 'no shoes, no shirt, no problem.'

I like Miami.

The ultimate 20-year plan is to be living in the Caribbean, writing, living off the land, eating from the ocean and probably smoking herb.

Hawaiian to me is a feeling of getting somewhere, without stepping on anybodys toes, without causing friction with anybody.

Caribbean reality resembles the wildest imagination.

[T]his free and easy old-bachelor sort of life is quite full of fun and jollity. Pease and myself room together; and everything like order and neatness is banished from our presence as a nuisance--old letters and old boots and shoes, duds clean and duds dirty, books and newspapers, tooth-brushes, shoe-brushes, and clothes-brushes, all heaped together on chairs, settees, etc., in dusty and "most admired confusion." Now, what is there imaginable in clean, tidy private life equal to this?

All the Padres need is a fly ball in the air.

Positano bites deep. It is a dream place that isn’t quite real when you are there and becomes beckoningly real after you have gone.

Only yonder magnificent pine-tree... holds her unchanging beauty throughout the year, like her half-brother, the ocean, whose voice she shares; and only marks the flowing of her annual tide of life by the new verdure that yearly submerges all trace of last year's ebb.

Is it snowing where you are? All the world that I see from my tower is draped in white and the flakes are coming down as big as pop-corns. It's late afternoon - the sun is just setting (a cold yellow colour) behind some colder violet hills, and I am up in my window seat using the last light to write to you.

You know what I like about summer days? They're just made for doing things... even if it's nothing. Especially if it's nothing.

You can try to trick the people and come out wearing a fedora and a tuxedo but that's not me. I was born in the late '70s, I wear jeans. I don't hang out in casinos. The lifestyle isn't my thing. I don't drink martinis and I don't smoke cigars.

So he left the lagoon and entered the jungle again, within a few days was completely lost, following the lagoons southward through the increasing rain and heat, attacked by alligators and giant bats, a second Adam searching for the forgotten paradises of the reborn Sun.

How thick the fog is. I can't see the road. All the people in the world could pass by and I would never know. I wish it was always that way. It's getting dark already. It will soon be night, thank goodness.

He balled up my discarded sweatshirt and put it against his shoulder. “Go on,” he said. “I don’t bite.” “And from what I hear, that’s a good thing.” He gave a rumbling chuckle. “Yeah, it is.” I leaned against his shoulder.

We are having wind and rain here, and I am very glad not to be alone. I work from memory on bad days, and that would not do if I were alone.