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Man and his codes! Even in a lawless inferno, man has to give himself some honor, he’s so desperate to separate himself from the beasts.
Because out there in the real world, freedom means you have to admit authorship, even when your story turns out to be a stinker.
I hate how no one can tell the story of his life without making a star of his enemy,
Now I realize it was because Dad’s philosophy had won him few personal victories in life:
“Do I have the necessary ruthlessness to marry a man I don’t really love for my son’s welfare? Yes, I do.”
when you put in that much effort to forget someone, the effort itself becomes a memory.
And now everyone returning from an armed conflict is called a hero too. In the old days you had to commit specific acts of valor during war; now you just need to turn up. These days when a war is on, heroism seems to mean ‘attendance.’”
I saw this death not just as a preview of my own, but as an echo.
I saw all the flies bang uselessly into the screen doors and all the fleas laughing as they rode in on pets.
blink. I opened my mouth and asked for cordial—I wanted to taste something sweet. Only people regaining consciousness in movies ask for water. In real life you think of cocktails with pineapple chunks and little umbrellas.
Just like Mom.
if my childhood taught me one thing, it’s that the differences between the rich and the poor are nothing. It’s the chasm between the healthy and the sick that you just can’t breach.
and conversations disintegrate into competing monologues.
You can’t run from your own leg, especially a leg that carries the weight of broken dreams.
I think anyone who says he looks to the future and doesn’t have one eye on the dirt is being shortsighted.
Go on, you sorry sack of shit, tell us why we’re bored.” “You’ve stopped learning,” I said.
I never heard of anyone with the guts to say, ‘I want knowledge. Gimme some.’
I realized that I was blindly following the orders of a woman who herself was blindly following rumors.
Many potential suiciders spend so much time composing their final words they wind up dying of old age!
When it comes to taking your own life, preparation is procrastination.
but if you feel that life is a brief flicker between two immense voids to which humanity is unfairly condemned,
“Look at the world through the perspective of eternity.”
you can’t stop someone from taking the role of alcoholic father simply by telling them it’s a cliché.
but you can no more easily wean a man off the part of Wife Beater than you can convince a woman to flee her own home by assuring her she has Battered Wife Syndrome.
after a while I understood that watching the universe expand is like watching grass grow,
One brother’s success is another brother’s failure.
If I study hard, I’ll pass my exams, but so what? What do I do between that moment and the moment of my death?
He was up against the smelliest prejudice in existence: wealth-haters. At least a racist, a man who hates black people, for instance—at least he isn’t harboring a secret desire to be black.
Yes, wealth hating is very hypocritical indeed !
She dropped the pink nightgown too and revealed black lingerie hugging a curvy body that I wanted to take home as a pillow.
a sublime idea in theory, soiled by the reality that deep down nobody really believes that all men are created equal.
Democracy
There’s nothing wonderful or interesting about unrequited love.
To love someone who doesn’t return your affections might be exciting in books, but in life it’s unbearably boring. I’ll tell you what’s exciting: sweaty, passionate nights.
sharing the elevator with two suits that had men trapped inside them.
Caroline’s absence seemed to weigh more heavily on both of us than murder.
One man’s dream is another man’s anchor.
These men are unspeakably dangerous, like understudies waiting to be called to be the star, their raging egos determined not to be undone by performance anxiety.
Religious nuts! It isn’t enough that they believe in God, they have to go all the way, seeing into his vast mind. They think faith gives them access to his glorious to-do lists.
and all I could think about was how I’d squandered my years of good health by just moping around and not climbing Everest.
Her conversation often drifted to her early life in Shanghai, before she was pregnant with me, when she was still pregnant with possibility.
“I feel like I took a wrong turn but went so far down the road I didn’t have the energy to turn back.
Don’t be afraid to have nothing.”
It’s a bad thing to come to the end of your life and discover you are not brave.”
These dumb, bored, unempathetic people are all around us.
they don’t know what it is to have your brain & your body want TWO things each that’s FOUR compelling ideas all at once.
trying to pick the padlock of life
The patrons smoke anything flammable & the bartender asks you what you want to drink as if you might be his old nemesis from high school
Pessoa called humanity “variable but unimprovable”—hard to find a better description than that.
Check out this quote.
No wonder key existentialists were French. It’s natural to be horrified at existence when you have to pay 4 dollars for coffee.
having finally sideslipped into the aromatic hairy pocket of the other gender.
it seemed very clear to me that loneliness is the worst thing in the world & people should ALWAYS be forgiven for all the compromises they make in love.
thought her face was one that you have to earn—there was a world-weariness in that face
