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Capitalism can't handle talking about limits, because the whole point of capitalism is the restless growth of capital.

People came to this country for either money or freedom. If you don't have money, you cling to your freedoms all the more angrily. Even if smoking kills you, even if you can't afford to feed your kids, even if your kids are getting shot down by maniacs with assault riffles. You may be poor, but the one thing nobody can take away from you is the freedom to fuck up your life whatever way you want to.

There are days so bad that only their worsening, only a descent into an outright orgy of badness, can redeem them.

you couldn't keep expecting wholehearted love without, at some point, requiting it. There was no credit to be earned for simply being good.

He didn't know what to do, he didn't know how to live.Each new thing he encountered in life impelled him in a direction that fully convinced him of its rightness, but then the next new thing loomed up and impelled him in the opposite direction, which also felt right.There was no controlling narrative: he seemed to himself a purely reactive pinball in a game whose only object was to stay alive for staying alive's sake

each encounter was like a poem he instantly memorized

She didn't seem to be very good at living her life, but it wasn't because she was stupid. Almost the opposite somehow. She had a comical-tragical sense of herself and seemed, moreover, genuinely apologetic for the way she was.

Parents are programmed to want the best for their kids, regardless of what they get in return. (...) But in fact, if you think about it, that's kind of a strange belief. Given what we know about the way people really are. Selfish and shortsighted and egotistical and needy. Why should being a perent, just in and of itself, somehow confer superior-personhood on everybody who tries it? Obviously it doesn't.

That can be a somewhat awkward question to ask a person. It's sort of like asking a childless couple why they don't have any children, or an unmarried person why they aren't married. You have to be careful with certain kinds of questions that may seem perfectly innocuous to you.

Everything he'd done with regard to her in the past three years had been calculated to foreclose the intensely personal sort of talks they'd had when he was younger: to get her to shut up, to train her to contain herself, to make her stop pestering him with her overfull heart and her uncensored self. Now that the training was complete and she was obediently trivial with him,he felt bereft of her and wanted to undo it

He at least didn't have to worry about her making any scenes. She'd never been a compromiser of him, never an insister on sidewalk hand-holding, never a clinger, a pouter, a reproacher. She saved up all her ardor for when they were alone, she was a specialist like that.

It's like the internet, or cable TV—there's never any center, there's no communal agreement, there's just a trillion little bits of distracting noise. We can never sit down and have any kind of sustained conversation (...) All the real things, the authentic things, the honest things are dying off. Intellectually and culturally, we just bounce around like random billiard balls, reacting to the latest random stimuli.

There was a song that changed the world. Attitude was what the peasants were missing. They already had everything else—humiliating servitude, grinding poverty, unpayable debts, horrific working conditions. But without a song, man, it added up to nothing.

Hay quienes se condenan a la monotonía de la vida más mediocre porque han sufrido un dolor o por mala suerte, pero también los hay que lo hacen porque han tenido más suerte que la que se sentían capaces de soportar.

Pero ahora esta ensoñación con Lia con los ojos abiertos, este tipo de amor como un recíproco y continuo desafío o corrida o safari, ya no le parecía en contradicción con la presencia de aquellas sombras hospicianas: eran lazos del mismo nudo con que estaban atadas entre sí —dolorosamente, con frecuencia (o siempre)— las personas.

Y pensó: sí, este modo de ser es el amor. Y siguió pensando: lo humano llega donde llega el amor; no tiene otros límites que los que nosotros le ponemos.

...y, en el fondo, ¿qué es lo que podía haber cambiado en ella? Poca cosa : algo que todavía no era y que, por tanto, se podía relegar a la nada (¿en qué punto un ser empieza a ser realmente un ser?), una potencialidad biológica, ciega (¿en qué punto un ser humano empieza a ser humano?), un algo que sólo una deliberada voluntad de hacerlo ser humano podía hacer entrar entre las presencias humanas.

...hubiera querido seguir chocando con las cosas, batiéndose, y, al mismo tiempo, le hubiera gustado alcanzar la calma interior, más allá de todo... No sabía lo que quería. Lo único que sabía era cuán distante estaba —él como todos— de vivir como hay que vivir lo que deseaba vivir.

¿Qué es esta necesidad nuestra de belleza?(...) ¿Un carácter adquirido, un reflejo condicionado, un convencionalismo lingüístico? ¿Un signo, un privilegio, un dato irracional de la suerte, como (...) lo es la fealdad, la deformidad, la mutilación? ¿O es un modelo siempre distinto que nos inventamos, histórico más que natural, una proyección de nuestros valores culturales?

Y lo que en ese momento recordaba de Lia era su piel, su color, y, sobre todo, un punto de su cuerpo —donde la espalda forma un arco neto y tenso para recorrerlo con la mano y donde luego se alza, dulcísima, la curva de las caderas—, un punto en el que ahora le parecía que se concentraba la belleza del mundo, lejanísima, perdida.

Hay tanta distancia de cómo se vive a cómo se debería vivir, que el que deja el estudio de lo que se hace para estudiar lo que se debería hacer, aprende más bien lo que debe obrar su ruina que lo que debe preservarle de ella: porque un hombre que en todas las cosas quiera hacer profesión de bueno, entre tantos que no lo son, no puede llegar más que al desastre.

Uno vive con los ojos puestos en las esperanzas que se le dan, en las esperanzas que uno alberga; las esperanzas son como un combustible. No se puede vivir sin ellas. Pero eso era como lanzar una moneda al aire. Hasta que la moneda cae, no se sabe si saldrá cara o cruz.

Con el paso de los días, tenía la sensación de que, poco a poco, su cuerpo se iba volviendo transparente. Se esforzó en pensar lo mínimo. Pero no pensar en nada era imposible. Cuando se produce un vacío, siempre hay algo que lo llena. Por lo menos, se consolaba, en ese momento no sentía la necesidad de odiar nada ni nadie.

But this was a tiny sliver of hope indeed; it was the way insane people lost in fantasies reasoned.

There's a hazardous sadness to the first sounds of someone else's work in the morning; it's as if stillness experiences pain in being broken. The first minute of the workday reminds you of all the other minutes a day consists of, and it's never a good thing to think of minutes as individuals. Only after other minutes have joined the naked, lonely first minute does the day become more safely integrated in its dayness.

Richard's affection for Walter made her feel better about Walter herself; his charisma had a way of ratifying anything it touched.

Patty felt like she'd taken some powerful drug that wasn't wearing off, or like she'd fallen into an incredibly vivid dream that she wasn't waking up from, except that she was fully aware, from second to second to second, that it wasn't a drug or a dream but just life happening to her, a life with only a present and no past, a romance unlike any romance she'd imagined.

It was a question she'd allowed herself to hope he wouldn't ask

Una vez más, en su larga trayectoria profesional, Ushikawa vio confirmado que no había nadie más fácil de engañar que quien está convencido de que hace lo correcto.

Quien parte a la guerra contra el escepticismo no puede ser escéptico acerca de su victoria, no puede resignarse a perder, de otro modo, se identifica con su enemigo