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Kindle Notes & Highlights
No matter how careful you are, there’s going to be the sense you missed something, the collapsed feeling under your skin that you didn’t experience it all. There’s that fallen-heart feeling that you rushed right through the moments where you should’ve been paying attention. Well, get used to that feeling. That’s how your whole life will feel someday.
“Game shows are designed to make us feel better about the random, useless facts that are all we have left of our education.”
“When did the future switch from being a promise to being a threat?”
“Only when we eat up this planet will God give us another. We’ll be remembered more for what we destroy than what we create.”
“Nothing of me is original. I am the combined effort of everybody I’ve ever known.”
your folks are like God because you want to know they’re out there and you want them to approve of your life, still you only call them when you’re in crisis and need something.
Why is it you feel like a dope if you laugh alone, but that’s usually how you end up crying? How is it you can keep mutating and still be the same deadly virus?
“First,” Manus says, “your parents, they give you your life, but then they try to give you their life.”
Years of living in the hope that what you’ll get will be better than what you have. Years of looking and feeling worse in the hope that you might look better.
he can bust any man after the long fight. Everybody here thinks the whole story is about them. Definitely that goes for everybody in the world.
All God does is watch us and kill us when we get boring. We must never, ever be boring.
“times like this, it helps to think of yourself as a sofa or a newspaper, something made by a lot of other people but not made to last forever.”
“It helps to know you’re not any more responsible for how you look than a car is,” Brandy says. “You’re a product just as much. A product of a product of a product. The people who design cars, they’re products. Your parents are products. Their parents were products. Your teachers, products. The minister in your church, another product,” Brandy says. Sometimes your best way to deal with shit, she says, is to not hold yourself as such a precious little prize.
“My point being,” Brandy says, “is you can’t escape the world, and you’re not responsible for how you look, if you look beauticious or butt-ugly. You’re not responsible for how you feel or what you say or how you act or anything you do. It’s all out of your hands,” Brandy says.
“Relax,” Brandy says, “Whatever you’re thinking, a million other folks are thinking. Whatever you do, they’re doing, and none of you is responsible. All of you is a cooperative effort.”
“You’re a product of our language,” Brandy says, “and how our laws are and how we believe our God wants us. Every bitty molecule about you has already been thought out by some million people before you,”
“The world,” Brandy says, “is your cradle and your trap.”
“The best way is not to fight it, just go. Don’t be trying all the time to fix things. What you run from only stays with you longer. When you fight something, you only make it stronger.” She says, “Don’t do what you want.” She says, “Do what you don’t want. Do what you’re trained not to want.”
It’s the opposite of following your bliss. Brandy tells me, “Do the things that scare you the most.”
“When you understand,” Brandy says, “that what you’re telling is just a story. It isn’t happening anymore. When you realize the story you’re telling is just words, when you can just crumble it up and throw your past in the trash can,” Brandy says, “then we’ll figure out who you’re going to be.”
It’s a hundred generations removed from anything original, but the truth is, aren’t we all?
Where I’m at is a big Episcopal church in downtown Newark, New Jersey, sitting in the dark while I try to write down everything. But isn’t that always the impossible impulse? Don’t we always try to rescue the doomed bits and pieces of life, in the hope that a mere story can become Noah’s Ark and deliver all the living things of the past to a bright and glorious immortality?
