quotes by Steve Toltz

"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)

"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)

"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 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)

"[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)

"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)

"That's how we slide, and while we slide we blame the world's problems on colonialism, imperialism, ccapitalism, 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)

"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)

"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)

"Don't be afraid to have nothing."
— Steve Toltz

"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)

"The moment seemed endless, but it was probably only half that."
— 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)

"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)

"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)

"Sometimes not talking is effortless, and other times it’s more exhausting than lifting pianos."
— 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

"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)

"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)

"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

"Sometimes I think the human animal doesn't really need food or water to survive, only gossip."
— 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)

"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)

"Don't touch me, you fat ghost!"
— Steve Toltz (A Fraction of the Whole)