Short Century Quotes

“That’s what nobody admits about men, how needy they are.”
― David Burr Gerrard, Short Century

“Subtle! Subtlety is bourgeois. Brecht us that when he popped drama’s cherry. He fucked drama until it stopped being subtle, like a lady, and started being useful, like a whore.”
― David Burr Gerrard, Short Century

“Don’t go to the protest. Go out and get laid. Unless you’re going to the protest to get laid.”
― David Burr Gerrard, Short Century

“I had always thought that vaginas, with their flaps and folds, looked somehow unfinished.”
― David Burr Gerrard, Short Century

“That was what maturity was: accepting things. The more things you accepted, the more mature you were.”
― David Burr Gerrard, Short Century

“Christianity has always been the Gestapo of desire, since long, long before there was a Gestapo. Instead of Jews to hate, Christianity has desire. Though I guess Christianity has Jews, too. In any case, all the ovens in the world can’t incinerate desire.”
― David Burr Gerrard, Short Century

“Accepting punishment – that would be revolutionary.”
― David Burr Gerrard, Short Century

“Human beings are terrible things, Arthur.”
― David Burr Gerrard, Short Century

“The months after the fall of the Wall constituted one of the few points in history when the past seemed to lead to the future, rather than the reverse. Historians would later mark it as the end of the twentieth century, the period dominated by murderous plans to perfect the world, the ‘short century’ of 1914 to 1989.”
― David Burr Gerrard, Short Century

“Arthur, do you think the fall of the Wall means anything? Do you think that this means that even one fewer body will burn?”
― David Burr Gerrard, Short Century

“Genocide, as many have noted, is a form of community-building.”
― David Burr Gerrard, Short Century

“It’s something of a cliché, at least among war correspondents, that war makes people unusually horny; what it actually does is make you want to touch as much flesh as you can get your hands on.”
― David Burr Gerrard, Short Century

“Once you’ve gotten used to a certain kind of smell from a certain kind of flesh, whether it’s a lover or a rotting corpse, you long for it when it’s not around. Or maybe it’s just me.”
― David Burr Gerrard, Short Century

“Saddam probably had weapons of mass destruction, and even if he didn’t, he was a weapon of mass destruction. A guy I dated my senior year made a lot of jokes about his own weapon of mass destruction, and I was more interested in the guy than I was in the war.”
― David Burr Gerrard, Short Century

“All nineteen-year-old males are children who are men capable of war.”
― David Burr Gerrard, Short Century

“Journalists of late seem too eager to change the world in various ways; the point is to describe it, accurately and carefully.”
― David Burr Gerrard, Short Century

“There was too much protection in a drone, protection that was also a denial of one’s own humanity, very much like the protection offered by a burqa.”
― David Burr Gerrard, Short Century

“To talk about something is the first step toward invading it.”
― David Burr Gerrard, Short Century

“I think that we were both wrong. I think that Arthur had sex with his sister to create a short century.”
“Daddy, what are you talking about?”
“He was trying to end something, and by ending it start something totally new.”
― David Burr Gerrard, Short Century

“Don’t you wonder sometimes,” Miranda asked, “whether women have all the power or no power at all?”
― David Burr Gerrard, Short Century

“I was afraid you would deny me three times before your cock grows.”
― David Burr Gerrard, Short Century

“See,” Miranda said, “this is the truth.” Sitting in class one morning, I found her pubic hair in my teeth.”
― David Burr Gerrard, Short Century

“The twentieth will be a short century,” he said. “Either we or the Soviets will launch the missiles before long, and all the lies will be burned away.”
― David Burr Gerrard, Short Century

“The problem with freedom is that when people have it, they do what they want to.”
― David Burr Gerrard, Short Century

“You could fling open every closet of regret and desire in yourself and the people you loved, and still there would be one closet you missed, and crouched in that closet, never to see the dark of day, would be your most crucial self.”
― David Burr Gerrard, Short Century

“All across the region the sexual revolution would arrive by tank.”
― David Burr Gerrard, Short Century

“He says that politics is a waste of time. Politics are? Politics is? Anyway, a waste of time. He says you should focus on your own sexual gratification.”
― David Burr Gerrard, Short Century

“Men do everything that men do, from waging war to reading books, for one purpose only: to get laid.”
― David Burr Gerrard, Short Century

“Praising heroes who slay monsters is a writer’s most ancient task.”
― David Burr Gerrard, Short Century