Look Closer

by David Ellis

don’t know why oddness and contradiction calm me, but they always have, maybe because of their familiarity, because I see so much of those traits in myself.

In the history of mankind, nobody has followed I don’t want you to take this the wrong way with something that could be taken any other way.

Why do privileged old white men in black robes get to decide what it’s like to be an African American kid stopped on the street by a cop?

It’s emotional enough, getting your period the first time; not having your mother around, and having all that come back, too, doubles the fun.

I talked to all kinds of therapists, who explained to me that we look at suicide through this prism of control. We think we can control other things and other people. So when someone we love takes their own life, we think we could have stopped it. We think we had control, and we blew it. We are so unwilling to give up this notion that we control things and people around us that we’d rather feel guilt over the suicide than admit that we didn’t have that control in the first place.”

I have become the man I despise.

I mean, I try to be reasonable. But sometimes, I let things bother me more than they should.

I’m trying to be reasonable about this. Sometimes I am a perfectly reasonable man. Other times, I let things bother me more than they should.

I’d never been sick, really sick, so I couldn’t imagine what that was like. But I certainly knew how it felt to watch someone you love deteriorate.

As a wise man once said, If you’re gonna set someone up, it better be a surprise.

Nowadays, the word “nonplussed” means both “confused” and “not confused.”

this has ALWAYS irked my nerves lmao

Soldiers aren’t prosecuted for killing other soldiers. They’re prosecuted only for killing innocents.

That’s pretty fucking far from normal. So I don’t see why my response had to be normal, either.”