Steve Toltz > Quotes

“Sometimes not talking is effortless, and other times it’s more exhausting than lifting pianos.”
― Steve Toltz, A Fraction of the Whole

“I think that's the real loss of innocence: the first time you glimpse the boundaries that will limit your potential.”
― Steve Toltz, A Fraction of the Whole

“Regrets came up and asked me if I’d like to own them. Declined them for the most part but took a few just so I wouldn’t leave this relationship empty handed.”
― Steve Toltz, A Fraction of the Whole

“I couldn't think of anything other than her and the components of her. For example, her red hair. But was I so primitive I let myself be bewitched by hair? I mean, really. Hair! It's just hair! Everyone has it! She puts it up, she lets it down. So what? And why did all the other parts of her have me wheezing with delight? I mean, who hasn't got a back, or a belly, or armpits? This whole finicky obsession serves to humiliate me even as I write it, sure, but I suppose it isn't that abnormal. That's what first love is all about. What happens is you meet a love object and immediately a hole inside you starts aching, the hole that is always there but you don't notice until someone comes along, plugs it up, and then runs away with the plug.”
― Steve Toltz, A Fraction of the Whole

“The game is an analogy for life: there are not enough chairs or good times to go around, not enough food, not enough joy, nor beds nor jobs nor laughs nor friends nor smiles nor money nor clean air to breathe...and yet the music goes on.”
― Steve Toltz, A Fraction of the Whole

“Or about how when you're a child, to stop you from following the crowd you're assaulted with the line "If everyone jumped off a bridge, would you?" but when you're an adult and to be different is suddenly a crime, people seem to be saying, "Hey. Everyone else is jumping off a bridge. Why aren't you?”
― Steve Toltz, A Fraction of the Whole

“As I passed through the gates, the blistered hands of nostalgia gave my heart a good squeeze and I realized you miss shit times as well as good times, because at the end of the day what you're really missing is just time itself. ”
― Steve Toltz, A Fraction of the Whole

“I didn't think anyone who had to demand respect ever got it.”
― Steve Toltz, A Fraction of the Whole

“[I'll teach you] how not to leave the windows of your heart open when it looks like rain and how everyone has a stump where something necessary was amputated. ”
― Steve Toltz, A Fraction of the Whole

“People carry their secrets in hidden places, not on their faces. They carry suffering on their faces. Also bitterness if there’s room.”
― Steve Toltz, A Fraction of the Whole

“That's how we slide, and while we slide we blame the world's problems on colonialism, imperialism, capitalism, corporatism, stupid white men, and America, but there's no need to make a brand name of blame. Individual self-interest: that's the source of our descent, and it doesn't start in the boardrooms or the war rooms either. It starts in the home.”
― Steve Toltz, A Fraction of the Whole

“Don't be afraid to have nothing.”
― Steve Toltz

“Sometimes I think the human animal doesn't really need food or water to survive, only gossip.”
― Steve Toltz, A Fraction of the Whole

“After all, memory may be the only thing on earth we can truly manipulate to serve us, so we don't have to look back at ourselves in the receding past and think, What an arsehole!”
― Steve Toltz, A Fraction of the Whole

“… she gave me a look that deftly combined tenderness with revulsion. To this day the memory of that look still visits me like a Jehovah’s Witness: uninvited and tireless.”
― Steve Toltz

“I was so happy I wanted to fold all the people into paper airplanes and fly them into the lidless eye of that big yellow moon.”
― Steve Toltz, A Fraction of the Whole

“What a nasty act of cruelty, giving a dying man his last wish. Don't you realize he doesn't want it? His real wish is not to die.”
― Steve Toltz, A Fraction of the Whole

“Let’s not mince words: the inside of the Sydney casino looks as if Vegas had an illegitimate child with Liberace’s underpants, and that child fell down a staircase and hit its head on the edge of a spade.”
― Steve Toltz, A Fraction of the Whole

“The moment seemed endless, but it was probably only half that.”
― Steve Toltz, A Fraction of the Whole

“He pointed the gun at me. Then he looked up at my hand & tilted his head slightly.
- Journey, he said. I had forgotten I was still holding the book.
- Céline, I said back in a whisper.
- I love that book.
- I'm only halfway through.
- Have you got to the point where --
- Hey, kill me, but don't tell me the end!”
― Steve Toltz, A Fraction of the Whole

“We were on our way to the twentieth floor, sharing the elevator with two suits that had men inside them.”
― Steve Toltz, A Fraction of the Whole

“There's nothing perplexing to me about a leafy shrub evolving out of the big bang, but that the post office exists because carbon exploded out of a supernova is a phenomenon so outrageous it makes my head twitch.”
― Steve Toltz, A Fraction of the Whole

“Love is hard work.”
― Steve Toltz, A Fraction of the Whole

“To have a child is to be impaled daily on the spike of responsibility.”
― Steve Toltz, A Fraction of the Whole

“Negotiating with memories isn't easy: how to choose between those panting to be told, those still ripening, those already shriveling, and those destined to be mangled by language and come out pulverized?”
― Steve Toltz, A Fraction of the Whole

“I’ll teach you how to decipher all the confused faces by closing your eyes & how to cringe when someone says the words ‘your generation’. I will teach you how not to demonise your enemies & how to make yourself unappetising when the hordes turn up to eat you. I’ll teach you how to yell with your mouth closed & how to steal happiness & how the only real joy is singing yourself hoarse & nude girls & how never to eat in an empty restaurant & how not to leave the windows of your heart open when it looks like rain & how everyone has a stump where something necessary was amputated. I’ll teach you how to know what’s missing.”
― Steve Toltz, A Fraction of the Whole

“Losers blame their parents; Failures blame their kids.”
― Steve Toltz

“We're always sick and we just don't know it. What we mean by health is only when our constant physical deterioration is undetectable.”
― Steve Toltz, A Fraction of the Whole

“Betrayal wears a lot of different hats. You don’t have to make a show of it like Brutus did, you don’t have to leave anything visible jutting from the base of your best friend’s spine, and afterward you can stand there straining your ears for hours, but you won’t hear a cock crow either. No, the most insidious betrayals are done merely by leaving the life jacket hanging in your closet while you lie to yourself that it’s probably not the drowning man’s size. That’s how we slide,
and while we slide we blame the world’s problems on colonialism, imperialism, capitalism, corporatism, stupid white men, and America, but there’s no need to make a brand name of blame. Individual self-interest: that’s the source of our descent, and it doesn’t start in the boardrooms or the war rooms either. It starts in the home.”
― Steve Toltz, A Fraction of the Whole

“I groaned. Man and his codes! Even in a lawless inferno, man has to give himself some honor, he's so desperate to separate himself from the beasts.”
― Steve Toltz, A Fraction of the Whole

“Those books of mine really got under their skin. Ironically, they thought I was inhuman because of the way I churned through library books.
How do you know how to pick them? Who tells you?' Daved asked me once.
I explained that there was a line. 'If you read Dostoyevsky, he mentions Pushkin, and so you go and read Pushkin and he mentions Dante, and so you go and read Dante and--'
All right!'
All books are in some way about other books.'
I get it!”
― Steve Toltz, A Fraction of the Whole

“A city is a strange place for dawn. The sun just can't seem to make any headway in the cold streets”
― Steve Toltz, A Fraction of the Whole

“Friendships are an unforseeable burden.”
― Steve Toltz, A Fraction of the Whole

“It's always something here - if there isn't a riot, then someone's usually trying to escape. The wasted effort helps me see the positives of imprisonment. Unlike those pulling their hair out in good society, here we don't have to feel ashamed of our day-to-day unhappiness. Here we have someone visible to blame - someone wearing shiny boots. That's why, on consideration, freedom leaves me cold. Because out there in the real world, freedom means you have to admit authorship, even when your story turns out to be a real stinker.”
― Steve Toltz, A Fraction of the Whole

“There are men put on this earth to make laws designed to break the spirits of men. There are those put here to have their spirits broken by those put here to break them. Then there are those who are here to break the laws that break the men who break the spirits of other men. I am one of those men. - Harry West”
― Steve Toltz, A Fraction of the Whole

“Are you listening, Jasper? Sometimes you'll be walking in the city late at night, and a woman walking in front of you will spin her head around and then cross the street simply because some members of your gender rape women and molest children!”
― Steve Toltz, A Fraction of the Whole

“Don't touch me, you fat ghost!”
― Steve Toltz, A Fraction of the Whole

“...I wondered if it was blasphemous to tell God that rainbows are kitsch.”
― Steve Toltz, A Fraction of the Whole

“We just didn't get it. We were weakened and exhilarated at the same time. A paranoiac's nightmare! A narcissist's dream! We didn't know how to feel: flattered or raped. Maybe both. We were puzzling at breakneck speed.”
― Steve Toltz, A Fraction of the Whole

“Apparently they died from overfeeding. Apparently I overfed them. Apparently fish are terrible glutons with absolutely no self-control who just don't know when they've had enough and will stuff themselves to death with those innocuous little beige flakes imaginatively labeled 'fish food.”
― Steve Toltz

“As I left my cab in the traffic jam, the driver made it clear he didn't like it that I was ending our relationship so unexpectedly”
― Steve Toltz, A Fraction of the Whole

“existence is humiliation, anyway.”
― Steve Toltz, A Fraction of the Whole

“Sex: the match that sets off human firework.”
― Steve Toltz, A Fraction of the Whole

“When we finished the kiss she said laughing, I can taste your loneliness - it tastes like vinegar. That annoyed me. Everyone knows loneliness tastes like cold potato soup.”
― Steve Toltz, A Fraction of the Whole

“You experience life alone, you can be as intimate with another as much as you like, but there has to be always a part of you and your existence that is incommunicable; you die alone, the experience is yours alone, you might have a dozen spectators who love you, but your isolation, from birth to death, is never fully penetrated.”
― Steve Toltz, A Fraction of the Whole

“Amen' is like the Send button on an email.”
― Steve Toltz, A Fraction of the Whole

“Sometimes they [people] throw off their freedom so quickly, you'd think it was burning them.”
― Steve Toltz, A Fraction of the Whole

“The past is truly an inoperable tumour that spreads to the present.”
― Steve Toltz, A Fraction of the Whole

“While Terry joined the others in the pool, I subjected myself to a dreadful thing called musical chairs, another cruel game. There's one chair short, and when the music stops you have to run for a seat. The life lessons never stop at a children's party. The music blares. You never know when it's going to stop. You're on edge the whole game; the tension is unbearable. Everyone dances in a circle around the ring of chairs, but it's no happy dance. Everyone has his eyes on the mother over by the radio, her hand poised on the volume control. Now and then a child wrongly anticipates her and dives for a chair. He's shouted at. He jumps off the seat again. He's a wreck. The music plays on. The children's faces are contorted in terror. No one wants to be excluded. The mother taunts the children by pretending to reach for the volume. The children wish she were dead. The game is an analogy for life: there are not enough chairs or good times to go around, not enough food, not enough joy, nor beds nor jobs nor laughs nor friends nor smiles nor money nor clean air to breathe...and yet the music goes on.”
― Steve Toltz

“...I thought how I hate any kind of mob - I hate mobs of sports fans, mobs of environmental demonstrators, I even hate mobs of super-models, that's how much I hate mobs. I tell you, mankind is bearable only when you get him on his own.”
― Steve Toltz, A Fraction of the Whole