Jason Porter > Quotes

“...I could feel her burrowing into my heart. I didn't know if the burrowing was like a kitten cuddling up to its mother or if it was like a chigger depositing its larvae underneath the skin of my ankles.”
― Jason Porter, Why Are You So Sad?

“What I needed was an emotional Geiger counter that could objectively measure other people for sadness. I looked at the woman in the car next to me. She was applying makeup during the stops, opening and closing her mouth like a feeding fish, staring at her red lips in the rearview mirror. I imagined holding the Geiger counter to her forehead. I would ask her a question about her children. Were they an accident? What dreams did they make impossible? She would say, “They are the best thing I ever did,” and the readout would expose her lie with a pixelated frown.”
― Jason Porter

“What does it feel like to get out of bed in the morning? It feels like pulling a sequoia out of the earth with your bare hands.”
― Jason Porter

“I looked at the clock on the microwave. I was late for work. I find it difficult to move at that hour. Like there are ankle weights on my soul.”
― Jason Porter

“And this load we carry—the anger, the fatigue, the resentment, and the deathly sense of compromise that is bound to our backs or held tightly in our clenched fists—it will still exist, but we won't have to carry it, because it belongs to the past or the future, and that's not where we'll be. We will experience more, and it will weigh less.”
― Jason Porter