Age of Vice

by Deepti Kapoor

There’s nothing we could have done, there’s everything we could have done. We’re all guilty. We’re all the same. Even if you care, you can’t get away. Especially if you care. How can you sleep at night? You have to be a saint. You have to wear a hair shirt and beat yourself with birch, give up all your belongings, go barefoot, sleep on the street, just to atone, and that won’t be enough, it won’t change anything. Or you just have to go on.”

“Our dreams let people die.” She turned away from him. “Tomorrow we move on.”

I love beauty. I want to create beautiful things. But that’s the last thing they understand. They want me to have a beautiful surface and be rotten to the core, like they are.”

I’ve always been afraid of the sea. Not the surface, but what’s underneath.”

I used to be so good at telling the truth. I was so good at telling the truth that I discovered it was easy to tell a lie. Do you understand me? I told enough lies to you. I couldn’t tell one from the other in the end.

The ghosts come out tonight.

I knew injustice when I saw it, in a novel, on the news, but I never understood the process of its creation. I never considered complicity, or the obligation to guard against it in yourself.

Passivity is normal—most people suffer from it. They watch the woman being beaten in the street. They watch the accident from the car window. They’re frozen, expecting someone else to intervene. I’m the same. Only I’ll go and stand right next to the beating and take notes. Remember this. Remember this. Write it down. Remember the light. Yeah, I just want to see where the story goes, it’s my privilege to observe the futility of life.

I don’t know, maybe as a man it’s something you can’t understand. Your fear arises from the things you do, not the things that are denied to you.

Everyone thinks of themselves as a victim, Dean, not a willing accomplice.

No one ever gets it back. Life just runs away from you. It never comes back, however hard you try, however much you want it to. This is the lesson you should know. You have to adapt or die.

He dared to dream at the roulette wheel of life and lost his shirt every time.