Kristopher Jansma > Quotes

“Does it sting like this because I've been robbed or because it was never mine to steal? ... Maybe an idea, like love, cannot ever be stolen away, just as it cannot ever have belonged to me and only me.”
― Kristopher Jansma, The Unchangeable Spots of Leopards

“Because no one was special, and no one was immune to tragedy.”
― Kristopher Jansma, Why We Came to the City

“She’s just this character to you. Both of us are! And we always have been. You don’t know what goes on in our heads. You don’t know where we come from or who we are . . . Can you even tell the difference anymore between what you’ve written about her and who she really, truly is?”
― Kristopher Jansma, The Unchangeable Spots of Leopards

“It is a fearful thing to love what death can touch. A fearful thing to love, hope, dream: to be— to be, And oh! to lose. A thing for fools, this, and a holy thing, a holy thing to love.”
― Kristopher Jansma, Why We Came to the City

“Everything I write is for her; none of it is ever good enough.”
― Kristopher Jansma, The Unchangeable Spots of Leopards

“If the gods actually know our fates and still try to meddle and wage their wars in us, then there must be some purpose in our choosing one of the many paths to that end. Man must have free will, or else why would the gods themselves bother?”
― Kristopher Jansma, Why We Came to the City

“These stories are all true, but only somewhere else.”
― Kristopher Jansma, The Unchangeable Spots of Leopards

“We began to build our castles in the air, hoping sooner or later they’d carry us off. New days came like clockwork without becoming tomorrows. We slept less and less, dipped in darkness through the daytime and heated by burning light in the endless evening. And only when we finally got up, threw on our clothes and walked away, did we realize that we had all been gone for years already.”
― Kristopher Jansma, Why We Came to the City

“It's all about realizing what you're doing to hold yourself back, like through hatred or fear or nihilism or eating gluten. You identify the things you want, and you finally allow yourself to take them-'

William lost the end of her diatribe as a garbage truck rolled by outside”
― Kristopher Jansma, Why We Came to the City

“Each time it goes around a little bit, a second goes away.”
“Where?” I asked, as the pendulum swung again. And again.
He winked at me. “It escapes. That’s why they call it that. Escapement.”
― Kristopher Jansma, The Unchangeable Spots of Leopards

“Makes you want to fold stories inside of stories inside of stories.”
― Kristopher Jansma, The Unchangeable Spots of Leopards

“Everybody's just got their nose in their own soup. They say they care, but they don't put poems in books for me to read ... They talk to me about 'adjusting my expectations for the world.' And how I need to be realistic and just accept that this is how things work and that life is unfair ... I know, I know, I know.”
― Kristopher Jansma, Why We Came to the City

“We came to the city because we wished to live haphazardly, to reach for only the least realistic of our desires, and to see if we could not learn what our failures had to teach, and not, when we came to live, discover that we had never died. We wanted to dig deep and suck out all the marrow of life, to be overworked and reduced to our last wit. And if our bosses proved mean, why then we’d evoke their whole and genuine meanness afterward over vodka cranberries and small batch bourbons. And if our drinking companions proved to be sublime then we would stagger home at dawn over the Old City cobblestones, into hot showers and clean shirts, and press onward until dusk fell again. For the rest of the world, it seemed to us, had somewhat hastily concluded that it was the chief end of man to thank God it was Friday and pray that Netflix would never forsake them.

Still we lived frantically, like hummingbirds; though our HR departments told us that our commitments were valuable and our feedback was appreciated, our raises would be held back another year. Like gnats we pestered Management— who didn’t know how to use the Internet, whose only use for us was to set up Facebook accounts so they could spy on their children, or to sync their iPhones to their Outlooks, or to explain what tweets were and more importantly, why— which even we didn’t know. Retire! we wanted to shout. We ha Get out of the way with your big thumbs and your senior moments and your nostalgia for 1976! We hated them; we wanted them to love us. We wanted to be them; we wanted to never, ever become them.

Complexity, complexity, complexity! We said let our affairs be endless and convoluted; let our bank accounts be overdrawn and our benefits be reduced. Take our Social Security contributions and let it go bankrupt. We’d been bankrupt since we’d left home: we’d secure our own society. Retirement was an afterlife we didn’t believe in and that we expected yesterday. Instead of three meals a day, we’d drink coffee for breakfast and scavenge from empty conference rooms for lunch. We had plans for dinner. We’d go out and buy gummy pad thai and throat-scorching chicken vindaloo and bento boxes in chintzy, dark restaurants that were always about to go out of business. Those who were a little flush would cover those who were a little short, and we would promise them coffees in repayment. We still owed someone for a movie ticket last summer; they hadn’t forgotten. Complexity, complexity.

In holiday seasons we gave each other spider plants in badly decoupaged pots and scarves we’d just learned how to knit and cuff links purchased with employee discounts. We followed the instructions on food and wine Web sites, but our soufflés sank and our baked bries burned and our basil ice creams froze solid. We called our mothers to get recipes for old favorites, but they never came out the same. We missed our families; we were sad to be rid of them.

Why shouldn’t we live with such hurry and waste of life? We were determined to be starved before we were hungry. We were determined to be starved before we were hungry. We were determined to decrypt our neighbors’ Wi-Fi passwords and to never turn on the air-conditioning. We vowed to fall in love: headboard-clutching, desperate-texting, hearts-in-esophagi love. On the subways and at the park and on our fire escapes and in the break rooms, we turned pages, resolved to get to the ends of whatever we were reading. A couple of minutes were the day’s most valuable commodity. If only we could make more time, more money, more patience; have better sex, better coffee, boots that didn’t leak, umbrellas that didn’t involute at the slightest gust of wind. We were determined to make stupid bets. We were determined to be promoted or else to set the building on fire on our way out. We were determined to be out of our minds.”
― Kristopher Jansma, Why We Came to the City

“Easy to remember, hard to think about.”
― Kristopher Jansma, Why We Came to the City

“He extends a hand, larger than a dinner plate, and I have no choice but to shake it. I think I can feel my metacarpals shattering. Julian jumps to summon our waitress again, mostly to avoid shaking hands with this Goliath. “And a pitcher of mimosas, as soon as humanly possible.”
― Kristopher Jansma, The Unchangeable Spots of Leopards

“Nejlepsi romanopisci vas umeni presvedcit, ze pribehy ktere ctete jsou skutecne.”
― Kristopher Jansma, The Unchangeable Spots of Leopards

“After I charge their brains with my own brand of skeptical electricity, I unleash them—the New Cynics—upon a world that is slowly and happily critiquing itself to death.”
― Kristopher Jansma, The Unchangeable Spots of Leopards

“The best thing to do—usually—was to let him play these things out. Who was I to tell a genius it was time to put his clothes back on?”
― Kristopher Jansma, The Unchangeable Spots of Leopards

“Evelyn was followed in by a sour-faced woman with long, glamorous dark hair and a stern-looking gentleman in a tuxedo who looked just like Julian, but with less hair. They both looked as though they might buy the auditorium just to burn it to the ground. Even in this crowd they seemed assuredly a cut above the rest.”
― Kristopher Jansma, The Unchangeable Spots of Leopards

“And for this imperfect immortality, what prices have been paid? How many livers, lungs, and veins? Shredded, polluted, shot? How many children deserted, family secrets betrayed, sordid trysts laid out for strangers to see? How many wives and husbands shoved to the side? How many ovens scorched with our hair? Gun barrels slid between our lips? Bathtubs slowly reddened by our blood and twisting drowned that drowned us? How many flawed pages burned in disgust and reduced to ashes? How many flawless moments observed from just a slight distance so that, later, we might reduce them to words? All with an unspoken prayer that these hard-won truths might outlast the brief years of our lives.”
― Kristopher Jansma, The Unchangeable Spots of Leopards

“The truth is only slightly less interesting than the story.”
― Kristopher Jansma, The Unchangeable Spots of Leopards

“Life branches infinitely, the future arrives in secrecy, and this would always be the most beautiful and terrifying thing about being alive.”
― Kristopher Jansma, Our Narrow Hiding Places

“Hadn't we been told that now we'd made it here, we could make it anywhere? Only none of us could say, exactly, what it was we'd made.”
― Kristopher Jansma, Why We Came to the City

“These things went right to his head, it was true, but so what?”
― Kristopher Jansma, Why We Came to the City

“Because no one was immune to tragedy.”
― Kristopher Jansma, Why We Came to the City

“The wind was telling the fish that hope is the last thing to die.”
― Kristopher Jansma, Why We Came to the City

“the world.” Jeffrey just shakes his head. “You don’t know what it was like. You weren’t there when things got really bad. That Haslett asshole kept on calling, and then Iowa, and whenever I went out, there’d be someone just staring at me. It was like I could see my words there in their heads. Crawling there on the undersides of their foreheads. It was like they thought I knew something. And they always ask me, Is it true? Is it true? Did it really happen? And then . . . What’s next? What are you working on now? All of these . . . these . . . these—”" (from "The Unchangeable Spots of Leopards: A Novel (Ala Notable Books for Adults)" by Kristopher Jansma)”
― Kristopher Jansma, The Unchangeable Spots of Leopards

“We’d been bankrupt since we’d left home; we’d secure our own society. Retirement was an afterlife we didn’t believe in and that we expected yesterday.”
― Kristopher Jansma, Why We Came to the City

“We were afraid to go on vacation because we didn't know if we could take coming back.”
― Kristopher Jansma, Why We Came to the City

“We lay up at night, wondering, What sorts of people would we be if we were no longer nervous and frayed?”
― Kristopher Jansma, Why We Came to the City