The Mezzanine Quotes

“That was the problem with reading: you always had to pick up again at the very thing that had made you stop reading the day before.”
― Nicholson Baker, The Mezzanine

“The neurons that do expire are the ones that made imitation possible. When you are capable of skillful imitation, the sweep of choices before you is too large; but when your brain loses its spare capacity, and along with it some agility, some joy in winging it, and the ambition to do things that don't suit it, then you finally have to settle down to do well the few things that your brain really can do well--the rest no longer seems pressing and distracting, because it is now permanently out of reach. The feeling that you are stupider than you were is what finally interests you in the really complex subjects of life: in change, in experience, in the ways other people have adjusted to disappointment and narrowed ability. You realize that you are no prodigy, your shoulders relax, and you begin to look around you, seeing local color unrivaled by blue glows of algebra and abstraction.”
― Nicholson Baker, The Mezzanine

“A bee rose up from a sun-filled paper cup, off to make slum honey from some diet root beer it had found inside.”
― Nicholson Baker, La mezzanine

“…you almost believe that you will never come to the end of a roll of tape; and when you do, there is a feeling, nearly, though very briefly, of shock and grief.”
― Nicholson Baker, The Mezzanine

“Perforation! Shout it out! The deliberate punctuated weakening of paper and cardboard so that it will tear along an intended path, leaving a row of fine-haired pills or tuftlets on each new edge! It is a staggering conception, showing an age-transforming feel for the unique properties of pulped wood fiber.”
― Nicholson Baker, The Mezzanine

“The whole point of straws, I had thought, was that you did not have to set down the slice of pizza to suck a dose of Coke while reading a paperback.”
― Nicholson Baker, The Mezzanine

“There is no good word for stomach; just as there is no good word for girlfriend. Stomach is to girlfriend as belly is to lover, and as abdomen is to consort, and as middle is to petite amie.”
― Nicholson Baker, The Mezzanine

“The fact that we had independently decided to sweep our apartments on that Sunday afternoon after spending the weekend together, I took as a strong piece of evidence that we were right for each other. And from then on when I read things Samuel Johnson said about the deadliness of leisure and the uplifting effects of industry, I always nodded and thought of brooms.”
― Nicholson Baker, The Mezzanine

“When you leave a job, one of the hardest decisions you have to make on cleaning out your desk is what to do with the coffinlike cardboard tray holding 958 fresh-smelling business cards. You can’t throw them out— they and the nameplate and a few sample payroll stubs are proof to yourself that you once showed up at that building every day and solved complicated, utterly absorbing problems there; unfortunately, the problems themselves, though they once obsessed you, and kept you working late night after night, and made you talk in your sleep, turn out to have been hollow: two weeks after your last day that already have contracted into inert pellets one-fiftieth of their former size; you find yourself unable to create the sense of what was really at stake, for it seems to have been the Hungarian 5/2 rhythm of the lived workweek alone that kept each fascinating crisis inflated to its full interdepartmental complexity. But coterminously, while the problems you were paid to solve collapse, the nod of the security guard, his sign-in book, the escalator ride, the things on your desk, the site of colleagues’ offices, their faces seen from characteristic angles, the features of the corporate bathroom, all miraculously expand: and in this way what was central and what was incidental end up exactly reversed.”
― Nicholson Baker, The Mezzanine

“The damage that you have inflicted heals over, and the scarred places left behind have unusual surface areas, roughnesses enough to become the nodes around which wisdom weaves its fibrils.”
― Nicholson Baker, The Mezzanine

“In old stapled problems, you can see the TB vaccine marks in the upper left corner where the staples have been removed and replaced, as the problem - even the staple holes of the problem - was copied and sent on to other departments for further action, copying, and stapling.”
― Nicholson Baker, La mezzanine

“The great scholarly or anecdotal footnotes of Lecky, Gibbon, or Boswell, written by the author of the book himself to supplement, or even correct over several later editions, what he says in the primary text, are reassurances that the pursuit of truth doesn't have clear outer boundaries: it doesn't end with the book; restatement and self-disagreement and the enveloping sea of referenced authorities all continue. Footnotes are the finer-suckered surfaces that allow tentacular paragraphs to hold fast to the wider reality of the library.”
― Nicholson Baker, The Mezzanine

“Abelardo, my manager, emerged from a stall. “What do you think, Howie?” he said; it was his standard greeting —one I was fond of.
“Abe, I don't know what to think,” I said; my standard response.”
― Nicholson Baker, The Mezzanine

“The feeling that you are stupider than you were is what finally interests you in the really complex subjects of life: in change, in experience, in the ways other people have adjusted to disappointment and narrowed ability. You realize that you are no prodigy, your shoulders relax, and you begin to look around you, seeing local color unrivaled by blue glows of algebra and abstraction.”
― Nicholson Baker, The Mezzanine

“Though simple, the trick was something that struck me as useful right now. Thus, the 'when I was little' nostalgia was misleading: it turned something that I was taking seriously as an adult into something soupier, less precise, more falsely exotic, than it really was. Why should we need lots of nostalgia to license any pleasure taken in the discoveries we carry over from childhood, when it is now so clearly an adult pleasure? I decided that from now on I wouldn't get that faraway look when describing things that excited me now, regardless of whether they had first been childhood enthusiasms or not.”
― Nicholson Baker, The Mezzanine

“With fewer total cells, but more connections between each cell, the quality of your knowledge undergoes a transformation: you begin to have a feel for situations, people fall into types, your past memories link together, and your life begins to seem, as it hadn’t when you were younger, an inevitable thing composed of a million small failures and successes dependently intergrown, as opposed to a bright beadlike row of unaffiliated moments.”
― Nicholson Baker, The Mezzanine

“Head & Shoulders (a repulsive name for a shampoo, when you think of it, but you never do)”
― Nicholson Baker, The Mezzanine

“Also, mugs, like car bumpers and T-shirts, have become places for people to proclaim allegiances, names, hobbies, heroes, graphic tastes.”
― Nicholson Baker, The Mezzanine

“I was a man, but I was not nearly the magnitude of a man I had hoped I might be”
― Nicholson Baker, The Mezzanine

“Subject of Thought Number of Times Thought Occurred per Year (in descending order)
L. 580.0
Family 400.0
Brushing tongue 150.0
Earplugs 100.0
Bill-paying 52.0
Panasonic three-wheeled vacuum cleaner, greatness of 45.0
Sunlight makes you cheerful 40.0
Traffic frustration 38.0
Penguin books, all 35.0
Job, should I quit? 34.0
Friends, don't have any 33.0
Marriage, a possibility? 32.0
Vending machines 31.0
Straws don't unsheath well 28.0
Shine on moving objects 25.0
McCartney more talented than Lennon? 23.0
Friends smarter, more capable than I am 19.0
Paper-towel dispensers 19.0
"What oft was thought, but ne'er" etc. 18.0
People are very dissimilar 16.0
Trees, beauty of 15.0
Sidewalks 15.0
Friends are unworthy of me 15.0
Indentical twins separated at birth, studies of traits 14.0
Intelligence, going fast 14.0
Wheelchair ramps, their insane danger 14.0
Urge to kill 13.0
Escalator invention 12.0
People are very similar 12.0
"Not in my backyard" 11.0
Straws float now 10.0
DJ, would I be happy as one? 9.0
"If you can't get out of it, get into it" 9.0
Pen, felt-tip 9.0
Gasoline, nice smell of 8.0
Pen, ballpoint 8.0
Stereo systems 8.0
Fear of getting mugged again 7.0
Staplers 7.0
"Roaches check in, but they don't check out" 6.0
Dinner roll, image of 6.0
Shoes 6.0
Bags 5.0
Butz, Earl 4.0
Sweeping, brooms 4.0
Whistling, yodel trick 4.0
"You can taste it with your eyes" 4.0
Dry-cleaning fluid, smell of 3.0
Zip-lock tops 2.0
Popcorn 1.0
Birds regurgitate food and feed young with it 0.5
Kant, Immanuel 0.5”
― Nicholson Baker, The Mezzanine

“Boswell, like Lecky (to get back to the point of this footnote), and Gibbon before him, loved footnotes. They knew that the outer surface of truth is not smooth, welling and gathering from paragraph to shapely paragraph, but is encrusted with a rough protective bark of citations, quotations marks, italics, and foreign languages, a whole variorum crust of "ibid.'s" and "compare's" and "see's" that are the shield for the pure flow of argument as it lives for a moment in one mind. They knew the anticipatory pleasure of sensing with peripheral vision, as they turned the page, gray silt of further example and qualification waiting in tiny type at the bottom. (They were aware, more generally, of the usefulness of tiny type in enhancing the glee of reading works of obscure scholarship: typographical density forces you to crouch like Robert Hooke or Henry Gray over the busyness and intricacy of recorded truth.) They liked deciding as they read whether they would bother to consult a certain footnote or not, and whether they would read it in context, or read it before the text it hung from, as an hors d'oeuvre. The muscles of the eye, they knew, want vertical itineraries; the rectus externus and internus grow dazed waggling back and forth in the Zs taught in grade school: the footnote functions as a switch, offering the model-railroader's satisfaction of catching the march of thought with a superscripted "1" and routing it, sometimes at length, through abandoned stations and submerged, leaching tunnels. Digression—a movement away from the gradus, or upward escalation, of the argument—is sometimes the only way to be thorough, and footnotes are the only form of graphic digression sanctioned by centuries of typesetters. And yet the MLA Style Sheet I owned in college warned against lengthy, "essay-like" footnotes. Were they nuts? Where is scholarship going?”
― Nicholson Baker, The Mezzanine

“Will the time ever come when I am not so completely dependent on thoughts I first had in childhood to furnish the feedstock for my comparisons and analogies and sense of the parallel rhythms of microhistory? Will I reach the point where there will be a good chance, I mean a more than fifty-fifty chance, that any random idea popping back into the foreground of my consciousness will be an idea that first came to me as an adult, rather than one I had repeatedly as a child? Will the universe of all possible things I could be reminded of ever be mostly an adult universe?”
― Nicholson Baker, The Mezzanine

“As it happened, the first three major advances in my life—and I will list all the advances here—

1. shoe-tying
2. pulling up on Xs
3. steadying hand against sneaker when tying
4. brushing tongue as well as teeth
5. putting on deodorant after I was fully dressed
6. discovering that sweeping was fun
7. ordering a rubber stamp with my address on it to make billpaying more efficient
8. deciding that brain cells ought to die

—have to do with shoe-tying, but I don't think that this fact is very unusual.”
― Nicholson Baker, The Mezzanine

“I ate a vendor's hot dog with sauerkraut (a combination whose tastiness still makes me tremble), walking fast in order to save as much of the twenty minutes of my lunch hour I had left for reading.”
― Nicholson Baker, The Mezzanine

“Why should we need lots of nostalgia to license any pleasure taken in the discoveries that we carry over from childhood, when it is now so clearly an adult pleasure? I decided that from now on I wouldn’t get that faraway look when describing things that excited me now, regardless of whether they had first been childhood enthusiasms or not.”
― Nicholson Baker, The Mezzanine

“Chance found me that day having worked for a living all morning, broken a shoelace, chatted with Tina, urinated successfully in a corporate setting, washed my face, eaten half of a bag of popcorn, bought a new set of shoelaces, eaten a hot dog and a cookie with some milk; and chance found me now sitting in the sun on a green bench, with a paperback on my lap.”
― Nicholson Baker, The Mezzanine

“it was defensible to want to stand like an Easter Island monument in this trance of motorized ascension through architectures of retailing. Fairly early on, riding up to Housewares to buy a Revere saucepan to pair with my Teflon fry pan and complete my kitchen,”
― Nicholson Baker, The Mezzanine

“Often in department stores I would get stuck behind two motionless passengers and want to seize their shoulders and urge them on, like an instructor at an Outward Bound program, saying, “Annette, Bruce—this isn’t the Land of the Lotus-Eaters. You’re on a moving stairway. Feel your own effortful, bobbing steps melt into the inexhaustible meliorism of the escalator.”
― Nicholson Baker, The Mezzanine

“I disapprove of this text now, but when I was little it bespoke the awesome oracular intentionality of prophets whose courage and confidence allowed them to scrap the old ways and start fresh: urban renewal architects; engineers of traffic flow; foretellers of monorails, paper clothing, food in capsule form, programmed learning, and domes over Hong Kong and Manhattan.”
― Nicholson Baker, The Mezzanine

“…the only way that we can understand the proportion and range and effect of those changes, which constitute the often undocumented daily texture of our lives (a rough, gravelly texture, like the shoulder of a road, which normally passes too fast for microscopy), is to sample early images of the objects in whatever form they take in kid-memory—and once you invoke those kid-memories, you have to live with their constant tendency to screw up your fragmentary historiography with violas of lost emotion.”
― Nicholson Baker, The Mezzanine