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Cigarettes made ideal partners: they made you look good, let you be needy for five minutes before replacing them with another. Stimulation, orality, the breathplay of carbon monoxide....yes, the romance of smoking was pure product placement, but it was still the sexiest way of hating yourself.

'Everyone had very uncreased necks, which meant no prolonged inclining of the head, which meant no reading. (Linda's own neck looked like a finger, but she reassured herself that the creases were like tree rings marking her substance.)'

This speaks to me. Through a megaphone.

If life was a gift, it was the sort (hastily wrapped, price tag attached) that only proved the giver didn't know or care about you at all.

slowest/painful form of suicide was living, running the whole decathalon of suffering, no breathers or bottled water. Fear of dying was irrational. Death was utilitarian. Decrease in net resource consumption and planetary suffering. Increase in net comedy.
...
Some people with terrible lives didn't kill themselves, but that didn't mean they shouldn't. Most people weren't alive and didn't mind. You couldn't regret it.

[on agitated depression/mixed state]

A state contradicting itself, where high met low, or as Linda put it later, where unstoppable farce met immovable abject.
Mania did a job on memory. Mostly he recalled being angry at facts. Needing to explain back at them.

The more mutinous studying he did, the more he packed up his emotional belongings and moved upstairs into his head. (It wasn't roomy but it was quiet, furnished with a library and wall-to-wall mirrors.)

I need to learn to forgo conjunctions (esp. "and") the way Tulathimutte does. It's so much better.

If life was matter, what form, phase, state? Was it a fabric, as the saying went, a differentially deforming continuum? Or was it the other saying, a river: fluid and turbulent? No, definitely a solid, considering its modes of failure. How it held together and fell apart. Fatigue. Fracture. Shock. Stress. Cracking. Crazing. Life was no gas. Life was definitely solid. Life was *hard*.

Even total honesty didn't remain true for long.

All compliments came freighted with uncertainty, along axes of sincerity, accuracy, intention, rhetoric. Trust was an arms race: facial expressions were supposed to circumvent lying, but faces could be concealed, so you went to kinesics and paralinguistics, and still voices were misconstrued, gestures mistaken, even silence misheard. At every word you were judged by what you had the least control over: everything.

You could never tell Henrik to lighten up because he was already "just kidding," and flattery only goaded him to deeper self-deprecation and made him suspect you were being disingenuous, though he'd never accuse you to your face, and if you tried to preemptively assure him you *weren't* being disingenuous, it just proved to him that you *knew* you were.

He resisted the shame he was supposed to feel; a life of rejection had funneled hi to this meager consolation, the one kindness he could render himself, and he was supposed to feel *bad*? Fuck that. He would allow some self-pity, however, and some primal reluctance to be seen for a while. It was good that porn didn't watch you back.

[Henrik trying to close his eyes] Stop, he thought. I own you, I am you, and I'm telling you to stop. But nothing stopped, not the wind thrashing outdoors, or gravity, or air pressure, creaming you under its ocean of air, never explaining itself, never cutting you a break. The forwardness of time, the downwardness of gravity, shoving everything like a plow--nature always acted personally. Nothing universal about it.

He had the physique of a car seat, pink as pork, and he wished he could take that off too.

The last detritus, the thing he couldn't throw out, was himself. His nose leaked; a teaspoon of phlegm kept regenerating in his throat; he blotted flop sweat in the elbow of his sweatshirt. From end to end his tract purred with insectile gurbles and blats wheezing flabbily through its maze of sphincters. Continence was a cornerstone of civility. The social contract reaffirmed itself in small diligences like these.

Henrik:

The worst thing about pills was that they worked. Without them, you might just adapt; medical optimism suspended you in a maintenance reality. He'd never known how sick he was until he'd gotten health insurance. The pill that really wanted inventing was the bitter one that cured you of optimism and made time go faster.

Henrik:

Try a syllogism: cleanliness was next to godliness and God didn't exist, so cleanliness was next to nothing, so he didn't have to do anything.

Henrik:

In the curriculum of self-care he hadn't quite figured out tidying up--or washing or eating or sleeping. Basics weren't easy. What made them basic was their unvarying necessity, to which we were adapted by eons of heredity and tradition, but he had neither. Complex things were manageable--you needed only the conscious brain. But basics were never easy.

Henrik:

He turned and paced back and forth through the fragments of his improvised life. Did he make this mess or did it make him?

'Corralled in four alphanumerics--{P, L, O, T}--reality went through its motions, with arbitrary flux at the quantum level. The shit bargain of the consciousness without autonomy. Free will was placebo. And it sure wasn't free. Henrik fell asleep, resting his head on the hard determinism.'

On funding:
Between Henrik and his money were the interests of eleven committees, public and private, prospecting for wonder pills and killer apps. Every joule of work had to be directed toward saving or justifying money, though money needed neither. Besides, what story could you craft around the infinite shrewdness and nauseating inelegance of matter?

Linda:

'Desolation sat like an uncle on her chest.'

'Babies: Why? It felt absurd to even name them; they were Platonic, all hardwired rootle and suckle. Kids were ids, expecting you to translate screams and smells into need: *why here, what this, I want--NOW*. Looking after a baby, you realized you used to be one; then, that you still *were* one, screaming to be fed, held, changed.'

Linda:

It was absurd that she could articulate exactly *how* she wanted to write but couldn't write it: both dirtbag lowbrow and Olympian highbrow (that was how she faced the world: one brow low, the other arched high). Not a voice of her generation, but *the* voice of *de*generation.

'"The didactic allegorical aspects might be pulling readers out of the story. The satire's a little on the nose."
Well, Linda said, what if the author *wanted* to pull readers out? And *break* their noses?'

I feel bad - I mislabeled Linda as 'Laura' in my earlier comments. Oh well.

...first-persons were just Band-Aids on a fault line. Wee needed a return to omniscience.

Contemporary writers were so shit-scared of moralizing that they delegated to their poor characters the responsibility of conveying their philosophies through indirect discourse, the indeterminate ironies of narrative distance, constraining writers from delivering the grand true-eyed pronouncements of Tolstoy or Proust. Writers had capitulated to the camera lens. Postmodern author surrogates and clairvoyant...(cont.)

More Laura:

'Being fired was fine as long as the job was awful, she decided. Living on tips meant soliciting the last thing she wanted: approval. Life had to come from somewhere; sometimes it came from below.'

I love her against my will.

Laura:

'only idiots expected sincerity; anyone with life experience perceived things through a proper corrective filter of mistrust. Unfinessed truth had the grime of rube and cliche; lying was ultimately more honest, so long as you were metahonest.'

'Of what club was the penis a member? Clearly one that excluded women.'

Cultures of permission valorized bad taste as liberation. Ecosystems need predators. Yes San Francisco was nothing if not vegetarian.

The saturating pall of loneliness was returning: its cold pinkie wending into the heart, its nauseating pressure at the temples and nuts, pulp of the teeth, root of the tongue, causing those shuddering hiccups that you didn't suppress because no one was around to hear them. His loneliness was ambidextrous and trilingual and weighed six hundred pounds.