The Flamethrowers Quotes

“People who are harder to love pose a challenge, and the challenge makes them easier to love. You're driven to love them. People who want their love easy don't really want love.”
― Rachel Kushner, The Flamethrowers

“I was doing that thing the infatuated do, stitching destiny onto the person we want stitched to us.”
― Rachel Kushner, The Flamethrowers

“I’d been listening to men talk since I arrived in New York City. That’s what men like to do. Talk. Profess like experts. When one finally came along who didn’t say much, I listened.”
― Rachel Kushner, The Flamethrowers

“It was not the case that one thing morphed into another, child into woman. You remained the person you were before things happened to you. The person you were when you thought a small cut string could determine the course of a year. You also became the person to whom certain things happened. Who passed into the realm where you no longer questioned the notion of being trapped in one form. You took on that form, that identity, hoped for its recognition from others, hoped someone would love it and you.”
― Rachel Kushner, The Flamethrowers

“Making art was really about the problem of the soul, of losing it. It was a technique for inhabiting the world. For not dissolving into it.”
― Rachel Kushner, The Flamethrowers

“A blend of good and bad characterized all humans, and to pretend to sort that out was an insult to human complexity. But at the same time, Sandro understood that people only tended to allow their own contradictions, and not those of others. It was OK to be murky to yourself, to know you weren't an angel, but other people had to be more cleanly divided into good and bad.”
― Rachel Kushner, The Flamethrowers

“You have time. Meaning don't use it, but pass through time in patience, waiting for something to come. Prepare for its arrival. Don't rush to meet it. Be a conduit.”
― Rachel Kushner, The Flamethrowers

“The answer is not coming. I have to find an arbitrary point inside the spell of waiting, the open absence, and tear myself away. Leave, with no answer. Move on to the next question.”
― Rachel Kushner, The Flamethrowers

“The desire for love is universal but that has never meant it’s worthy of respect. It’s not admirable to want love, it just is.”
― Rachel Kushner, The Flamethrowers

“(Later, Giddle's response when I told her I was in love: "Oh God, I'm so sorry. Love is awful. It ruins every normal thing, everything but itself. It makes you crazy and for nothing, because it's so disappointing. But good luck with that.")”
― Rachel Kushner, The Flamethrowers

“To be young was to be more closely rooted to the thing that forms you,”
― Rachel Kushner, The Flamethrowers

“But I had seen, the night I met her, that her beauty was going to leave her like it does all women. For the face, time relays some essential message, and time is the message. It takes things away. But its passage, its damages, are all we have. Without it, there's nothing.”
― Rachel Kushner, The Flamethrowers

“It was just one night of drinking and chance. I'd known it at the moment I met him, which was surely why I was enchanted in the first place. Enchantment means to want something and also to know, somewhere inside yourself, not an obvious place, that you aren't going to get it.”
― Rachel Kushner, The Flamethrowers

“And here I arrive at my point. The point is that everyone has a different dream. The point is that it is a grave mistake to assume your dream is in any way shared, that it’s a common dream. Not only is it not shared, not common, there is no reason to assume that other people don’t find you and your dream utterly revolting.”
― Rachel Kushner, The Flamethrowers

“She smiled at him like they were about to rob a bank together.”
― Rachel Kushner, The Flamethrowers

“All you can do is involve yourself totally in your own life, your own moment, Lonzi said. And when we feel pessimism crouching on our shoulders like a stinking vulture, he said, we banish it, we smother it with optimism. We want, and our want kills doom.”
― Rachel Kushner, The Flamethrowers

“We should torture language to tell the truth.”
― Rachel Kushner, The Flamethrowers

“It wasn’t quite a romantic infatuation. There are levels of readiness. Young girls don’t entertain the idea of sex, their body and another’s together. That comes later, but there isn’t nothing before it. There’s an innocent displacement, a dreaming, and idols are perfect for a little girl’s dreaming. They aren’t real. They aren’t the gas station attendant trying to lure you into the back of the service station, a paperboy trying to lure you into a toolshed, a friend’s father trying to lure you into his car. They don’t lure. They beckon, but like desert mirages.”
― Rachel Kushner, The Flamethrowers

“What occurred did so because I was open to it, and not because fate and I met at a certain angle. I had plenty of time to think about this later. I thought about it so much that the events of that evening sometimes ran along under my mood like a secret river, in the way that all buried truths rushed along quietly in some hidden place.”
― Rachel Kushner, The Flamethrowers

“Isn’t that what intimacy so often is? Supposing you understand, conveying that you do, because you feel in theory that you could understand, and you want to, and yet secretly you don’t?”
― Rachel Kushner, The Flamethrowers

“A funny thing about women and machines: the combination made made curious. They seemed to think it had something to do with them.”
― Rachel Kushner, The Flamethrowers

“A forced contemplation of the heavens, crisp and angelic blue, a classic prelude to death.”
― Rachel Kushner, The Flamethrowers

“Reality, in a sense, was not an objective place where you were thrust. You had to maintain your hold on it by vigilantly keeping watch over whatever slight and intangible thing gave your life its meaning. Call it a soul, or presence. Whatever it was, a prisoner or guest and you had to trick it or petition it into lingering.”
― Rachel Kushner, The Flamethrowers

“A funny thing about women and machines: the combination made men curious. They seemed to think it had something to do with them.”
― Rachel Kushner, The Flamethrowers

“People who are harder to love pose a challenge, and the challenge makes them easier to love. You’re driven to love them. People who want their love easy don’t really want love.”
― Rachel Kushner, The Flamethrowers

“The thing suppressed as an intrusion," Eric said, "is almost always worth looking at.”
― Rachel Kushner, The Flamethrowers

“There's an innocent displacement, a dreaming, and idols are perfect for a little girl's dreaming. They aren't real. They aren't the gas station attendant trying to lure you into the back of the service station, a paperboy trying to lure you into a toolshed, a friend's father trying to lure you into his car. They don't lure. They beckon, but like desert mirages.”
― Rachel Kushner, The Flamethrowers

“...it is easier to like difficult people when they are leaving, or already gone.”
― Rachel Kushner, The Flamethrowers

“I trusted the need for risk, the importance of honoring it.”
― Rachel Kushner, The Flamethrowers

“A blend of good and bad characterized all humans, and to pretend to sort that out was an insult to human complexity. But at the same time, Sandro understood that people only tended to allow their own contradictions, and not those of others. It was okay to be murky to yourself, to know you weren’t an angel, but other people had to be more cleanly divided into good and bad.”
― Rachel Kushner, The Flamethrowers