quotes by Peter Cameron

"What if she was meant to be, or could have been, someone important in my life? I think that's what scares me: the randomness of everything. That the people who could be important to you might just pass you by. Or you pass them by. How do you know...I felt that by walking away I was abandoning [them], that I spent my entire life, day after day, abandoning people."
— Peter Cameron (Someday This Pain Will Be Useful to You)

"People who have only good experiences aren't very interesting. They may be content, and happy after a fashion, but they aren't very deep. It may seem a misfortune now, and it makes things difficult, but well--it's easy to feel all the happy, simple stuff. Not that happiness is necessarily simple. But I don't think you're going to have a life like that, and I think you'll be the better for it. The difficult thing is to not be overwhelmed by the bad patches. You must not let them defeat you. You must see them as a gift--a cruel gift, but a gift nonetheless."
— Peter Cameron (Someday This Pain Will Be Useful to You)

"I often feel like I want to think something but I can't find the language that coincides with the thoughts, so it remains felt, not thought. Sometimes I feel like I'm thinking in Swedish without knowing Swedish."
— Peter Cameron (Someday This Pain Will Be Useful to You)

"Most people think things are not real unless they are spoken, that it's the uttering of something, not the thinking of it, that legitimizes it. I suppose this is why people always want other people to say "I love you." I think just the opposite—that thoughts are realest when thought, that expressing them distorts or dilutes them."
— Peter Cameron

"I knew my mother was right, but that didn't change the way I felt about things. People always think that if they can prove they're right, you'll change your mind."
— Peter Cameron (Someday This Pain Will Be Useful to You)

"I hate when people say 'I see'. It doesn't mean anything and I think it's hostile. Whenever anyone tells me 'I see' I think they're really saying 'Fuck you'."
— Peter Cameron (Someday This Pain Will Be Useful to You)

"I always looked forward to being an adult, because I thought the adult world was, well—adult. That adults weren’t cliquey or nasty, that the whole notion of being cool, or in, or popular would case to be the arbiter of all things social, but I was beginning to realize that the adult world was as nonsensically brutal and socially perilous as the kingdom of childhood."
— Peter Cameron (Someday This Pain Will Be Useful to You)

"“But are you glad you went to college? Was it a good experience?”

“I suppose it was. Althought I can’t remember a single thing I learned. Except for Latin, and that’s only because the nuns literally beat it into us and I use it sometimes for the crossword.”

“There were nuns at Radcliffe?”

“Yes, it was all nuns.”

“Are you sure? At Radcliffe?”

“Maybe it was high school.”

“But you aren’t Catholic,” I said. “I don’t think you ever went to a parochial school.”

“Well, I distinctly remember nuns with sticks walking up and down the aisles as we recited Latin. Maybe it was a show I was in, but I doubt it because nuns don’t beat children in musicals.”"
— Peter Cameron (Someday This Pain Will Be Useful to You)

"One man’s nonsense is another man’s sense."
— Peter Cameron (Someday This Pain Will Be Useful to You)

"New York is strange in the summer. Life goes on as usual but it’s not, it’s like everyone is just pretending, as if everyone has been cast as the star in a movie about their life, so they’re one step removed from it. And then in September it all gets normal again."
— Peter Cameron (Someday This Pain Will Be Useful to You)

"I hate stand-up comics; I think funny is something you are, not something you desperately try to be in front of a roomful of obnoxious people."
— Peter Cameron (Someday This Pain Will Be Useful to You)

"I don't think I could ever work in such a blatantly hierarchical corporate setting. I know that everyone in this world is not equal, but I can't bear environments that make this truth so obvious."
— Peter Cameron (Someday This Pain Will Be Useful to You)

"'Are you okay?' she asked me.
'Of course,' I said. 'Why wouldn't I be okay?'
'There are lots of reasons why you might not be okay.'
'There are lots of reasons why anyone might not be okay,' I said."
— Peter Cameron (Someday This Pain Will Be Useful to You)

"The first night Stephen and I slept together, he whispered numbers into my ear: long, high numbers -- distances between planets, seconds in a life. He spoke as if they were poetry, and they became poetry. Later, when he fell asleep, I leaned over him and watched, trying to picture a mathematician's dreams. I concluded that Stephen must dream in abstract, cool designs like Mondrian paintings."
— Peter Cameron

"Dr. Adler had instructed me to always say whatever I was thinking, but this was difficult for me, for the act of thinking and the act of articulating those thoughts were not synchronous to me, or even necessarily consecutive. I knew that I thought and spoke in the same language and that theoretically there should be no reason why I could not express my thoughts as they occurred or soon thereafter, but the language in which I thought and the language in which I spoke, though both English, often seemed divided by a gap that could not be simultaneously, or even retrospectively, bridged."
— Peter Cameron (Someday This Pain Will Be Useful to You)

"I thought the best thing to do would be nothing, and in that way things couldn’t get any worse."
— Peter Cameron (Someday This Pain Will Be Useful to You)

"It seemed that everyone else could mate, could fit their parts together in pleasant and productive ways, but that some almost indistinguishable difference in my anatomy and psyche set me slightly, yet irrevocably, apart."
— Peter Cameron (Someday This Pain Will Be Useful to You)

"I wish the whole day were like breakfast, when people are still connected to their dreams, focused inward, and not yet ready to engage with the world around them. I realized this is how I am all day; for me, unlike other people, there doesn't come a moment after a cup of coffee or a shower or whatever when I suddenly feel alive and awake and connected to the world. If it were always breakfast, I would be fine."
— Peter Cameron (Someday This Pain Will Be Useful to You)