Mark Schiffer > Mark's Quotes

“Money is sad shit”
― Richard Brautigan, The Edna Webster Collection of Undiscovered Writings

“These friends are giving Mireille what she wants, but she doesn’t want to be the person who wants what she wants, and so she goes on wanting inaccurately and still her eyes shine.”
― Meg Howrey, The Wanderers

“If we could just be on earth at the same place and same time as everyone we loved, if we could be born together and die together, it would be so simple. And it’s not. But listen: You two are on the planet at the same time. You’re in the same place now. That’s a miracle. I just want to say that.”
― Rebecca Makkai, The Great Believers

“People’s marriages were like two-person religious cults, impossible to understand.”
― Meg Wolitzer, The Female Persuasion

“And you don’t always have to feel the compulsion to keep striving toward something for the sake of striving. No one will think less of you. There are no grades anymore, Greer. Sometimes I think you forget that. There are never going to be grades for the rest of your life, so you just have to do what you want to do. Forget about how it looks. Think about what it is.”
― Meg Wolitzer, The Female Persuasion

“This was an era in which sofa beds were frequently opened and unfolded; at this age people were still floating, not entirely landed, still needing places to stay the night sometimes. They were doing what they could, crashing in other places, living extemporaneously. Soon enough, the pace would pick up, the solid matter of life would kick in. Soon enough, sofa beds would stay folded.”
― Meg Wolitzer, The Female Persuasion

“That’s another thing about ghosts, a very important thing—you have to be careful, because hauntings are contagious. Hauntings are memes, especially pernicious thought contagions, social contagions that need no viral or bacterial host and are transmitted in a thousand different ways. A book, a poem, a song, a bedtime story, a grandmother’s suicide, the choreography of a dance, a few frames of film, a diagnosis of schizophrenia, a deadly tumble from a horse, a faded photograph, or a story you tell your daughter. Or a painting hanging on a wall.”
― Caitlín R. Kiernan, The Drowning Girl

“I’m a guy who works on projects with blueprints, but I’m on my own here. It feels dark a lot of the time; I thought it would clear up, and it’s eased a little, but it’s still dark. So I watch what’s left of my life like a security guard on the night shift, checking the locks when I know I don’t need to, pacing the perimeter of someplace nobody’s going to break into, except that you never know. Something could happen. So you keep watch. They don’t pay security guards just because they’re a few bodies short on the payroll.”
― John Darnielle, Universal Harvester

“Daylight had not brought a solution, but it had accorded indifference.”
― Michael McDowell, The Elementals

“One thing marriage counseling instilled in Hilton was a compulsion for open communication. Whether at home or at work, he knew that anything left unsaid was far more dangerous than spoken words could be, no matter how hurtful. His”
― Tananarive Due, The Between: A Novel

“One thing marriage counseling instilled in Hilton was a compulsion for open communication. Whether at home or at work, he knew that anything left unsaid was far more dangerous than spoken words could be, no matter how hurtful.”
― Tananarive Due, The Between: A Novel

“Because it’s the quotidian minutes of our lives that will go on forever, that will tell us who we were, who our neighbors and our mothers were, when we were too diligent in thinking they were nothing like us.”
― Lisa Taddeo, Three Women

“Unlike my street, which smells of sad man piss, hers smells of autumn leaves.”
― Mona Awad, Bunny

“That not being understood is a privilege I can’t afford. That I can’t believe this woman got paid to come here. That I think she should apologize to trees. Spend a whole day on her knees in the forest, looking up at the trembling aspens and oaks and whatever other trees paper is made of with tears in her languid eyes and say, I’m fucking sorry. I’m sorry that I think I’m so goddamned interesting when it is clear that I am not interesting. Here’s what I am: I’m a boring tree murderess.”
― Mona Awad, Bunny

“And, like the rest of America, Paradise slept: well past the wee hours, to the break of Sunday dawn. Across the city, across the county, one hundred and eighty-eight thousand lives lay down together in isolated slumber, unconsciously intertwined.
And not a one of them ever even saw it coming.”
― John Skipp, The Bridge

“I think a lot about queer villains, the problem and pleasure and audacity of them. I know I should have a very specific political response to them. I know, for example, I should be offended by Disney’s lineup of vain, effete ne’er-do-wells (Scar, Jafar), sinister drag queens (Ursula, Cruella de Vil), and constipated, man-hating power dykes (Lady Tremaine, Maleficent). I should be furious at Downton Abbey’s scheming gay butler and Girlfriend’s controlling, lunatic lesbian, and I should be indignant about Rebecca and Strangers on a Train and Laura and The Terror and All About Eve, and every other classic and contemporary foppish, conniving, sissy, cruel, humorless, depraved, evil, insane homosexual on the large and small screen. And yet, while I recognize the problem intellectually—the system of coding, the way villainy and queerness became a kind of shorthand for each other—I cannot help but love these fictional queer villains. I love them for all of their aesthetic lushness and theatrical glee, their fabulousness, their ruthlessness, their power. They’re always by far the most interesting characters on the screen. After all, they live in a world that hates them. They’ve adapted; they’ve learned to conceal themselves. They’ve survived.”
― Carmen Maria Machado, In the Dream House

“As it turns out, queer villains become far more interesting among other gay characters, both within a specific project or universe and the zeitgeist at large. They become one star in a larger constellation; they are put in context. And that’s pretty exciting, even liberating; by expanding representation, we give space to queers to be—as characters, as real people—human beings. They don’t have to be metaphors for wickedness and depravity or icons of conformity and docility.11 They can be what they are.”
― Carmen Maria Machado, In the Dream House

“We can’t stop living. Which means we have to live, which means we are alive, which means we are humans and we are human: some of us are unkind and some of us are confused and some of us sleep with the wrong people and some of us make bad decisions and some of us are murderers. And it sounds terrible but it is, in fact, freeing: the idea that queer does not equal good or pure or right. It is simply a state of being—one subject to politics, to its own social forces, to larger narratives, to moral complexities of every kind. So bring on the queer villains, the queer heroes, the queer sidekicks and secondary characters and protagonists and extras. They can be a complete cast unto themselves. Let them have agency, and then let them go.”
― Carmen Maria Machado, In the Dream House

“How to read her coldness: She is preoccupied. She is unhappy. She is unhappy with you. You did something and now she’s unhappy, and you need to find out what it is so she will stop being unhappy. You talk to her. You are clear. You think you are clear. You say what you are thinking and you say it after thinking a lot, and yet when she repeats what you’ve said back to you nothing makes sense. Did you say that? Really? You can’t remember saying that or even thinking it, and yet she is letting you know that it was said, and you definitely meant it that way.”
― Carmen Maria Machado, In the Dream House

“Reader, do you remember that ridiculous movie Volcano, the one with Tommy Lee Jones? Do you remember how they stopped eruption in the middle of downtown Los Angeles? They diverted it with cement roadblocks and pointed fire hoses at it, and rerouted the lava to the ocean, and everything was fine? Sweet reader, that is not how lava works. Anyone can tell you that. Here is the truth: I keep waiting for my anger to go dormant, but it won’t. I keep waiting for someone to reroute my anger into the ocean, but no one can. My heart is closer to Dante’s Peak of Dante’s Peak. My anger dissolves grandmas in acid lakes and razes quaint Pacific Northwest towns with ash and asphyxiates jet engines with its grit. Lava keeps leaking down my slopes. You should have listened to the scientist. You should have evacuated earlier.”
― Carmen Maria Machado, In the Dream House

“A reminder to remember: just because the sharpness of the sadness has faded does not mean that it was not, once, terrible. It means only that time and space, creatures of infinite girth and tenderness, have stepped between the two of you, and they are keeping you safe as they were once unable to.”
― Carmen Maria Machado, In the Dream House

“In honor of New England, he selected a can of baked beans, prying it from its clam-tight place with diligence and vindictives. He opened it, set it on the stove top, and allowed it to simmer right in the can—until the bubbling sound of it and the molasses-sweet smell of it overpowered his senses. Then he plunged into it with a wooden spoon and ate it all like a hungry terrier, surprised at the slurping noises that came out of him, glad that his mother was in Ohio.”
― Herman Raucher, Maynard's House

“But the beans—ah, the beans. And the pickles—oh, the pickles. And the grapefruit juice, and the coffee, and the Dr. Jekyllish formulation of all that Austin had so cavalierly tossed into his maw left no doubt in his head that nature was not only calling—she was screaming bloody murder.”
― Herman Raucher, Maynard's House

“In the morning he would forget all of it—but the night was not yet over. And somewhere in the darkest, iciest low part of it, when even owls and loons were prompted to noiselessness out of either fear or respect, he slipped deeper into sleep, as deep into it as a man could go without losing all chance of coming back. Still, even in the pit of it, he could hear and identify the sound. The rocker, creaking.”
― Herman Raucher, Maynard's House

“Outside, in and about the snow and the dark, where fancies dangled and fear hung over the starched snow in rolling mists, something was coming to pass.”
― Herman Raucher, Maynard's House

“Sorrow in discovering that the pyramid was not a five-thousand-year wonder of the civilized world, mysteriously and permanently constructed by generation after generation of hardy men who had died in order to perfect it, but that it had been made in the back room at Sears, by a clever window dresser, of papier-mâché, guaranteed to last for a mere lifetime.”
― Toni Morrison, Song of Solomon

“It starts, and we’re quiet for a while. Engrossed. Julie and I first watched this movie our freshman year, drunk after a bad party at a frat house. We huddled on the couch in our common room under layers of blankets. We shared a pint of mint chocolate chip ice cream. We stayed up until five a.m., talking about what a good movie it was and whether or not we’d ever date a widower. We theorized about the true weight of baggage in relationships we weren’t mature enough to have or experienced enough to understand. As I watch the movie again with her now, there’s a phantom taste of mint in my mouth.”
― Rachel Harrison, The Return

“The ship was flagged to Panama, which meant that legally it was a floating piece of Panamanian territory, but of course Panama had neither the incentive nor the manpower to investigate a disappearance off the west coast of Africa. It is possible to disappear in the space between countries.”
― Emily St. John Mandel, The Glass Hotel

“Give me quiet, he thought, give me forests and ocean and no roads. Give me the walk to the village through the woods in summer, give me the sound of wind in cedar branches, give me mist rising over the water, give me the view of green branches from my bathtub in the mornings. Give me a place with no people in it, because I will never fully trust another person again.”
― Emily St. John Mandel, The Glass Hotel

“Caring about Starbucks monopolizing coffee culture is for people who don’t have more pressing problems.”
― Imogen Binnie, Nevada