Make Something Up: Stories You Can't Unread
Rate it:
Open Preview
Kindle Notes & Highlights
3%
Flag icon
And he’s STILL dying, the old man’s leaving me not knowing the answer to anything. He’s abandoning me while I’m still so fucking stupid.
4%
Flag icon
And a punch line is called a “punch line” for a VERY good reason, because punch lines are a sugarcoated fist with whipped cream hiding the brass knuckles that socks you right in the kisser, hitting you—POW!—right in your face and saying, “I am smarter than you” and “I’m bigger than you” and “I call the shots, here, Buddy-BOY.”
5%
Flag icon
She betray a blond sneak thief out to brutalize a fly crib where a dozen bro dawgs capitulate to respire.
Amber
Jesus Christ I hate when he writes like this. This is why I disliked "Pygmy." It's so hard to read.
11%
Flag icon
They continue to be young and hot, but they no longer worry about the day when they won’t be. It’s suicide, but it’s not.
11%
Flag icon
Uncle Henry doesn’t understand that all my friends have already jumped.
11%
Flag icon
No offense to Jesus, but the meek won’t inherit the earth. To judge from reality TV the loudmouths will get their hands on everything.
11%
Flag icon
The Kardashians and the Baldwins are like some invasive species. Like kudzu or zebra mussels. Let them battle over the control of the crappy real world.
12%
Flag icon
Every mirror shows me what little is left of my parents.
12%
Flag icon
To be or not to be. God’s greatest gift to animals is they don’t get a choice.
12%
Flag icon
Every time I open the newspaper I want to throw up. In another ten seconds I won’t know how to read. Better yet, I won’t have to. I won’t know about global climate change. I won’t know about cancer or genocide or SARS or environmental degradation or religious conflict.
12%
Flag icon
I don’t mind losing my education. I don’t mind
12%
Flag icon
forgetting my name. But I will miss the little bit I can remember about my parents.
13%
Flag icon
Everyone’s holding on to someone, and everyone’s holding on to everyone, and their voices repeat the same sentence: “If you hurt yourself, you hurt me…if you hurt yourself, you hurt me…”
14%
Flag icon
Just this bread, the whole way your mom might find it at the farm or wherever bread grows.
15%
Flag icon
It’s like, if you live a boring-enough life, knowing the price of Rice-A-Roni and hot dog wieners, your big reward is you get to live for a week in some hotel in London? You get to ride on some airplane to Rome. Rome, like, in Italy. You fill your head full of enough ordinary junk, and your payoff is giant supermodels giving you a snowmobile? If this game show wants to see how smart you really are, they need to ask you how much calories in a regular onion–cheddar cheese bagel. Go ahead, ask you the price of your cell phone minutes any hour of the day. Ask you about the cost of a ticket for ...more
16%
Flag icon
They should ask you the price of a Long Island Iced Tea. The price of Marcia Sanders’s abortion. Ask about your expensive herpes medication you have to take but don’t want your folks to know you need. Ask the price of your History of European Art textbook which cost three hundred bucks—fuck you very much. Ask what that stamp of Hello Kitty set you back.
16%
Flag icon
It’s probably the acid, but—you’re battling some old nobody you’ve never met, fighting over shit you don’t even want.
16%
Flag icon
And maybe you don’t know what you want out of your life, but you know it’s not a grandfather clock.
21%
Flag icon
It could be what occurred in the video wasn’t about pleasure as much as it was about surviving the real version of what life did to you every day.
23%
Flag icon
To test if he’d done the right thing, Randall put the gun barrel to the side of his head and squeezed the trigger one last time. The hammer fell, but nothing more happened. The chamber was empty. He’d been forgiven.
23%
Flag icon
happiness is like a ticking bomb.
25%
Flag icon
“Dude, did it ever cross your mind that maybe—just maybe—Britney is mentally retarded?”
Amber
Called it.
27%
Flag icon
The way she says this sounds dirty, because everything sounds dirty when it comes out of a sexy girl’s mouth.
32%
Flag icon
PHOENIX
Amber
I read this as a Kindle single. It's pretty friggin good.
33%
Flag icon
He was loyal and even-tempered, and Ted was a hard worker if you stayed on top of him every second and told him exactly what to do. She’d married him for all the reasons she might hire a long-term employee.
35%
Flag icon
Backing her up are the moans and groans from next door, those sounds without language that weak people make against their will.
35%
Flag icon
The problem with educating stupid people was that they didn’t know they were stupid. The same went for curing crazy people. As far as the cat was concerned, Ted was both.
35%
Flag icon
The essence of being a parent was the shift from being the person who is watched to being the person who does the watching.
36%
Flag icon
What kind of mother is she if she can’t sense whether her child is dead or alive?
38%
Flag icon
She explains to her daughter how the only problem with marrying a spineless, lazy, stupid man is that you could be stuck with him for the rest of your life.
38%
Flag icon
It’s another mess that Rachel needs to clean up.
38%
Flag icon
“Your daddy’s stalling is the reason why you’ll never see a sunset.”
Amber
Ouch
39%
Flag icon
problem with passive people is that they force you to take action. After that, they hate you for it. They never forgive you.
Amber
Preach, sis.
41%
Flag icon
“No, my son.” He says, “That’s why you’re adopted.”
Amber
😆
46%
Flag icon
He worried that language had come to the Earth and invented people in order to perpetuate itself.
50%
Flag icon
It contained nothing but fleas and a paperback copy of Fight Club.
Amber
I guess by now you can self-reference, Chuck, I'll allow it.
53%
Flag icon
As a young man, he’d been an idealist in a corrupt world. It was no surprise that he’d turned out equally as corrupt, just a new and different form of corrupt.
55%
Flag icon
Every year a kid or two left a party, staggering into the windblown sand, and was never heard from again. The desert consumed them as a sacrifice. As tribute. Somewhere in the thousand square miles of wasteland, the storm buried each of them where they fell. Build it. Burn it. Build it. Burn it. Worship and destroy.
58%
Flag icon
Rooster, Rabbit, and Aardvark came from clean homes and had parents who expressed love and respect for them. It goes without saying that they were beaten by bullies almost weekly.
58%
Flag icon
To make matters worse their school practiced a no-tolerance policy regarding violence so if any hitting occurred everyone involved was punished with a mandatory suspension. For the bully, this amounted to a week’s vacation, but to the victim it meant falling behind in coursework. So
Amber
This is a bullshit policy and I would fight it so hard as a parent.
58%
Flag icon
“The first rule of Flunk Klub,” Aardvark said, “is you don’t talk about Flunk Klub.”
Amber
Oh Chuck 😝
68%
Flag icon
All men are doomed to spend most of their existence among the dead.
69%
Flag icon
“Prithee pay heed, the first-most rule regarding the monster is thee must nevermore speak of meeting the monster.” The stranger continued to speak thusly in the stilted, archaic parlance of his forebearers a century ere. “The second-most rule regarding the monster is thee must nevermore speak of meeting the monster.”
Amber
Chuck, really? *Later I realized there's a reason for the parallel but at this point hadn't caught on yet.*
69%
Flag icon
His secret dream was to face down such a horror that it would leave him inoculated. He’d never suffer fear of anything, ever again.
70%
Flag icon
To be a boy without a father is to grow guns in place of arms and a loaded cannon for a mouth. Always, at all times to be under siege with no reinforcements. To sprint at full speed into the pitch dark with fury trumping your fear, not aware that what you actually want is to hit a brick wall, or stumble into a pit, to find some limits, some restrictions and discipline. A broken leg. A concussion. Punishment from a surrogate father, even if that father is merely physics, to slap you down and make you toe some ultimate line.
71%
Flag icon
His life was powered by a battery with loneliness at one pole and rage at the opposite and Felix existed, suspended between the two, helpless.
72%
Flag icon
“You’ve smote me in the ear!”
Amber
Hah!
78%
Flag icon
When I ask, “Why blond?” she asks if I read the newspapers. Incredulous, she says, “It’s always more tragic when a blonde dies.”
81%
Flag icon
It felt wonderful. He’d told jokes before. Any clown could make people laugh. But this was a terrible new ability. He had the power to make his mother cry. It wasn’t much of a superpower, but it was a start.
89%
Flag icon
Kevin said, “Between church people raising babies who would grow up to be homo and gay guys raising babies who would end up as breeders, I can’t understand the fuss.” He snorted in disdain. “To me it all looks like a wash.”
« Prev 1