## Metadata - Author: [[John Fante]] - Full Title: Ask the Dust - Category: #books ## Highlights - Then Lola Linton came on, slithering like a satin snake amid the tumult of whistling and pounding feet, Lola Linton lascivious, slithering and looting my body, and when she was through, my teeth ached from my clamped jaws and I hated the dirty lowbrow swine around me, shouting their share of a sick joy that belonged to me. ([Location 267](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B003JBI2QG&location=267)) - When I was a kid pictures of Lola Lintons used to come my way, and I used to get so impatient with the slow crawl of time and boyhood, longing for this very moment, and here I am, and I have not changed nor have the Lola Lintons, but I fashioned myself rich and I am poor. ([Location 270](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B003JBI2QG&location=270)) - I pulled the huge door open and it gave a little cry like weeping. Above the altar sputtered the blood-red eternal light, illuminating in crimson shadow the quiet of almost two thousand years. It was like death, but I could remember screaming infants at baptism too. I knelt. This was habit, this kneeling. I sat down. Better to kneel, for the sharp bite at the knees was a distraction from the awful quiet. A prayer. Sure, one prayer: for sentimental reasons. Almighty God, I am sorry I am now an atheist, but have You read Nietzsche? Ah, such a book! Almighty God, I will play fair in this. I will make You a proposition. Make a great writer out of me, and I will return to the Church. And please, dear God, one more favor: make my mother happy. I don’t care about the Old Man; he’s got his wine and his health, but my mother worries so. Amen. ([Location 279](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B003JBI2QG&location=279)) - But you’re cleaner than me because you’ve got no mind to sell, just that poor flesh. ([Location 351](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B003JBI2QG&location=351)) - It was a story about their own middle-west, about Colorado and a snowstorm, and there they were with their uprooted souls and sun-burned faces, dying in a blazing desert, and the cool homelands from whence they came were so near at hand, right there in the pages of that little magazine. And I thought, ah well, it was ever thus—Poe, Whitman, Heine, Dreiser, and now Bandini; thinking that, I was not so hurt, not so lonely. ([Location 792](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B003JBI2QG&location=792)) - From below rose the roar of the sea. Far out fog-banks crept toward the land, an army of ghosts crawling on their bellies. Below us the breakers flayed the land with white fists. They retreated and came back to flay it again. As each breaker retreated, the shoreline broke into an ever-widening grin. We coasted in second down the spiral road, the black pavement perspiring, fog tongues licking it. The air was so clean. We breathed it gratefully. There was no dust here. ([Location 998](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B003JBI2QG&location=998)) - She was gone when I woke up. The room was eloquent with her departure. A window open, curtains blowing gently. A closet door ajar, a coat-hanger on the knob. The half-empty glass of milk where I had left it on the arm of the chair. Little things accusing Arturo Bandini, but my eyes felt cool after sleep and I was anxious to go and never come back. ([Location 1507](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B003JBI2QG&location=1507)) - Here was the endlessly mute placidity of nature, indifferent to the great city; here was the desert beneath these streets, around these streets, waiting for the city to die, to cover it with timeless sand once more. There came over me a terrifying sense of understanding about the meaning and the pathetic destiny of men. The desert was always there, a patient white animal, waiting for men to die, for civilizations to flicker and pass into the darkness. Then men seemed brave to me, and I was proud to be numbered among them. 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. I looked southward in the direction of the big stars, and I knew that in that direction lay the Santa Ana desert, that under the big stars in a shack lay a man like myself, who would probably be swallowed by the desert sooner than I, and in my hand I held an effort of his, an expression of his struggle against the implacable silence toward which he was being hurled. Murderer or bartender or writer, it didn’t matter: his fate was the common fate of all, his finish my finish; and here tonight in this city of darkened windows were other millions like him and like me: as indistinguishable as dying blades of grass. Living was hard enough. Dying was a supreme task. And Sammy was soon to die. I stood at the mailbox, my head against it, and grieved for Sammy, and for myself, and for all the living and the dead. Forgive me, Sammy! Forgive a fool! I walked back to my room and spent three hours writing the best criticism of his work I could possibly write. I didn’t say that this was wrong or that was wrong. I kept saying, in my opinion this would be better if, and so forth, and so forth. I got to sleep about six o’clock, but it was a grateful, happy sleep. How wonderful I really was! A great, soft-spoken, gentle man, a lover of all things, men and beast alike. ([Location 1906](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B003JBI2QG&location=1906)) - Her face was a manuscript of misery and exhaustion. ([Location 2235](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B003JBI2QG&location=2235)) - Far away like frightened birds, the echo of our feet floated through the upper floors. ([Location 2270](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B003JBI2QG&location=2270)) - So this was where she lived! I smelled it, touched it with my fingers, walked through it with my feet. It was as I had imagined. This was her home. Blindfolded I could have acknowledged the place, for her odor possessed it, her fevered, lost existence proclaimed it as part of a hopeless scheme. An apartment on Temple Street, an apartment in Los Angeles. She belonged to the rolling hills, the wide deserts, the high mountains, she would ruin any apartment, she would lay havoc upon any such little prison as this. It was so, ever in my imagination, ever a part of my scheming and thinking about her. This was her home, her ruin, her scattered dream. ([Location 2291](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B003JBI2QG&location=2291)) - When it was all gone, the dream of floating toward bursting stars, and the flesh returned to hold my blood in its prosaic channels, when the room returned, the dirty sordid room, the vacant meaningless ceiling, the weary wasted world, I felt nothing but the old sense of guilt, the sense of crime and violation, the sin of destruction. ([Location 2323](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B003JBI2QG&location=2323)) - Four days to wait. I exhausted them playing pin games and slot machines. Luck was against me. I lost a lot of money, but I killed a lot of time. ([Location 2420](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B003JBI2QG&location=2420)) - I bought a car, a 1929 Ford. It had no top, but it sped like the wind, and with the coming of dry days I took long rides along the blue coastline, up to Ventura, up to Santa Barbara, down to San Clemente, down to San Diego, following the white line of the pavement, under the staring stars, my feet on the dashboard, my head full of plans for another book, one night and then another, all of them together spelling dream days I had never known, serene days I feared to question. ([Location 2456](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B003JBI2QG&location=2456))