To Rise Again at a Decent Hour Quotes

“Of course I alienate myself from society. It's the only way I know of not being constantly reminded of all the ways I'm alienated from society.”
― Joshua Ferris, To Rise Again at a Decent Hour

“I was already at one remove before the Internet came along. I need another remove? Now I have to spend the time that I'm not doing the thing they're doing reading about them doing it? Streaming the clips of them doing it, commenting on how lucky they are to be doing all those things, liking and digging and bookmarking and posting and tweeting all those things, and feeling more disconnected than ever? Where does this idea of greater connection come from? I've never in my life felt more disconnected. It's like how the rich get richer. The connected get more connected while the disconnected get more disconnected. No thanks man, I can't do it. The world was a sufficient trial, Betsy, before Facebook.”
― Joshua Ferris, To Rise Again at a Decent Hour

“It is forgivable to say nothing out of ignorance; it's inexcusable to remain silent once awareness dawns.”
― Joshua Ferris, To Rise Again at a Decent Hour

“Everything was always something, but something—and here was the rub—could never be everything.”
― Joshua Ferris, To Rise Again at a Decent Hour

“People have all this resentment against their parents for fucking them up, but they never realize, the minute they have a kid, that they cease being the child so fondly victimized in their hearts and start being the benighted perpetrators of unfathomable pain.”
― Joshua Ferris, To Rise Again at a Decent Hour

“Baseball is the slow creation of something beautiful. It is the almost boringly paced accumulation of what seems slight or incidental into an opera of bracing suspense. The game will threaten never to end, until suddenly it forces you to marvel at how it came to be where it is and to wonder at how far it might go. It’s the drowsy metamorphosis of the dull into the indescribable.”
― Joshua Ferris, To Rise Again at a Decent Hour

“Why shouldn't it be that way for the rest of us? Why not just go with it? Just walk the dog and send the tweets and eat the scones and play with the hamsters and ride the bicycles and watch the sunsets and stream the movies and never worry about any of it? I didn't know it could be that easy. I didn't know that until just now. That sounds good to me.”
― Joshua Ferris, To Rise Again at a Decent Hour

“I encouraged my patients to floss. It was hard to do some days. They should have flossed. Flossing prevents periodontal disease and can extend life up to seven years. It’s also time consuming and a general pain in the ass. That’s not the dentist talking. That’s the guy who comes home, four or five drinks in him, what a great evening, ha-has all around, and, the minute he takes up the floss, says to himself, What’s the point? In the end, the heart stops, the cells die, the neurons go dark, bacteria consumes the pancreas, flies lay their eggs, beetles chew through tendons and ligaments, the skin turns to cottage cheese, the bones dissolve, and the teeth float away with the tide. But then someone who never flossed a day in his life would come in, the picture of inconceivable self-neglect and unnecessary pain— rotted teeth, swollen gums, a live wire of infection running from enamel to nerve— and what I called hope, what I called courage, above all what I called defiance, again rose up in me, and I would go around the next day or two saying to all my patients, “You must floss, please floss, flossing makes all the difference.”
― Joshua Ferris, To Rise Again at a Decent Hour

“If you hate the Yankees so much,” Connie asked me, “why did you move to New York?” “To find out what kind of city could make a monster like a Yankees fan.”
― Joshua Ferris, To Rise Again at a Decent Hour

“The most unfortunate thing about being an atheist wasn’t the loss of God and all the comfort and reassurance of God — no small things — but the loss of a vital human vocabulary. Grace, charity, transcendence: I felt them as surely as any believer, even if we differed on the ultimate cause, and yet I had no right words for them.”
― Joshua Ferris, To Rise Again at a Decent Hour

“I had never thought much of genealogy. A lot of wasted time collecting the names of the dead. Then stringing those names, like skulls upon a wire, into an entirely private and thus irrelevant narrative, lacking any historical significance. The narcissistic pastime of nostalgic bores.”
― Joshua Ferris, To Rise Again at a Decent Hour

“The connected get more connected while the disconnected get more disconnected.”
― Joshua Ferris, To Rise Again at a Decent Hour

“Her internalization of Catholicism and its institutional disappointments suited a dental office perfectly, where guilt was often our last resort for motivating the masses.”
― Joshua Ferris, To Rise Again at a Decent Hour

“Because of God, even the imperious ballbreakers, moralizing windbags, and meddling assholes may know love.”
― Joshua ferris , To Rise Again at a Decent Hour

“I can’t help but be attracted to pregnant women. Unless they’re malnourished. I’ll see a malnourished pregnant woman on the subway sometimes, big in the belly but with stick-figure arms and hair like a rat’s, and I want to buy her a space heater. I want to yell at her parents. I remember going up to this real malnourished-looking pregnant lady on the G train one time and asking her if she’d like a free dinner at Junior’s. She couldn’t believe I was trying to pick her up on the G train, a pregnant woman with a ring on her finger. I hadn’t noticed the ring. It was one hell of a big ring. I tried to convince her that I wasn’t trying to pick her up. I offered to give her fifty bucks for cooking oil. That just made matters worse. Turns out she was a famous model. I’ve seen her on billboards.”
― Joshua Ferris, To Rise Again at a Decent Hour

“Freedom of religion in America is all fine and good until you start believing in nothing, and then it is a crime to be punished.’ ” “Is”
― Joshua Ferris, To Rise Again at a Decent Hour

“I swore never to use the emoticon ever… until one day, offhandedly and without much thought, I used my first :) and, shortly thereafter, in spite of my initial resistance, :) became a regular staple of my daily correspondence”
― Joshua Ferris, To Rise Again at a Decent Hour

“I was already at one remove before the Internet came along. I need another remove? Now I have to spend the time that I’m not doing the thing they’re doing reading about them doing it? Streaming all the clips of them doing it, commenting on how lucky they are to be doing all those things, liking and digging and bookmarking and posting and tweeting all those things, and feeling more disconnected than ever? Where does this idea of greater connection come from? I’ve never in my life felt more disconnected.”
― Joshua Ferris, To Rise Again at a Decent Hour

“She no longer lived in a world of speculation or recall and would take nothing on faith when the facts were but a few clicks away. It drove me nuts. I was sick to death of having as my dinner companions Wikipedia, About.com, IMDb, the Zagat guide, Time out New York, a hundred Tumblrs, the New York Times, and People magazine. Was there not some strange forgotten pleasure in reveling in our ignorance? Would we just be wrong?”
― Joshua Ferris, To Rise Again at a Decent Hour

“I left Brookstone and went to the Pottery Barn. When I was a kid and everything inside our house was familiar, cheap, and ruined, walking into the Pottery Barn was like entering heaven. If they really wanted people to enjoy church, I thought back then, they should make everything in church look and smell like the Pottery Barn. My dream was to surround myself one day with everything in the store, with the wicker baskets and scented candles, the brushed-silver picture frames. But that was a long time ago. I had already gone through a period of buying everything there was to buy at the Pottery Barn and decorating my apartment like a Pottery Barn outlet, and then getting rid of it all during a massive upgrade. Now everything at the Pottery Barn looked ersatz and mass-produced. To buy any of it now would be to regress in aspiration and selfhood. I didn’t want to buy anything at the Pottery Barn so much as I wanted to recapture the feeling of wanting to buy everything from the Pottery Barn. Something similar happened at the music store. I should try to find some new music, I thought, because there was a time when new music could lift me out of a funk like nothing else. But I wasn’t past the Bs when I saw the only thing I really cared to buy. It was the Beatles’ Rubber Soul, which had been released in 1965. I already owned Rubber Soul. I had owned Rubber Soul on vinyl, then on cassette, and now on CD, and of course on my iPod, iPod mini, and iPhone. If I wanted to, I could have pulled out my iPhone and played Rubber Soul from start to finish right there, on speaker, for the sake of the whole store. But that wasn’t what I wanted. I wanted to buy Rubber Soul for the first time all over again. I wanted to return the needle from the run-out groove to the opening chords of “Drive My Car” and make everything new again. That wasn’t going to happen. But, I thought, I could buy it for somebody else. I could buy somebody else the new experience of listening to Rubber Soul for the first time. So I took the CD up to the register and paid for it and, walking out, felt renewed and excited. But the first kid I offered it to, a rotund teenager in a wheelchair looking longingly into a GameStop window, declined on the principle that he would rather have cash. A couple of other kids didn’t have CD players. I ended up leaving Rubber Soul on a bench beside a decommissioned ashtray where someone had discarded an unhealthy gob of human hair. I wandered, as everyone in the mall sooner or later does, into the Best Friends Pet Store. Many best friends—impossibly small beagles and corgis and German shepherds—were locked away for display in white cages where they spent their days dozing with depression, stirring only long enough to ponder the psychic hurdles of licking their paws. Could there be anything better to lift your spirits than a new puppy?”
― Joshua Ferris, To Rise Again at a Decent Hour

“After Connie and I broke up, I played a little game with myself out on the streets of Manhattan. It was called Things Could Be Worse. Things could be worse, I said to myself, I could be that guy.”
― Joshua Ferris, To Rise Again at a Decent Hour

“Mrs. Convoy leaned into the desk, flattening her knuckles on it like a linebacker bracing against the hard earth, and with eyeballs floating above her bifocals asked why I felt it necessary to sit in my own waiting room during peak hours. I told her, she said, “And how is the ‘complete experience’?” I told her, she said, “And do you think the ‘complete experience’ might be enhanced by a dentist who tends to his patients in a timely manner?” I told her, she said, “We will not get a reputation for being a drill-and-bill shop just because you tend to patients in a timely manner. Jesus Mary and Joseph,” she said. “Sometimes I think we all work for Toots the Clown.”
― Joshua Ferris, To Rise Again at a Decent Hour

“This is really what you want? To live with a poet?” “Yes,” she said. “With the hot plate? And the lice?”
― Joshua Ferris, To Rise Again at a Decent Hour

“So for the sake of your identity,” she said, “you avoided using your real name, which effectively allowed someone else to use your real name and steal your identity.”
― Joshua Ferris, To Rise Again at a Decent Hour

“Unless by some miracle, he got up from the chair and changed his life. Unless some store of character revealed itself, and with a little guidance from me, he returned in six months a new man. But even then, I thought, that change, that character, would have to be in him already. I was never going to manufacture it with a few stern warnings—God knows I’d tried—and pain forgets within the hour what it learns in an instant.”
― Joshua Ferris, To Rise Again at a Decent Hour

“The most unfortunate thing about being an atheist wasn’t the loss of God and all the comfort and reassurance of God—no small things—but the loss of a vital human vocabulary. Grace, charity, transcendence: I felt them as surely as any believer, even if we differed on the ultimate cause, and yet I had no right words for them.”
― Joshua Ferris, To Rise Again at a Decent Hour

“don’t think I don’t worry about what I’m missing out on. Don’t think I’m not haunted knowing that I might be missing out on things that I’d much prefer not to be missing out on. I am haunted, Betsy. You think I alienate myself from society? Of course I alienate myself from society. It’s the only way I know of not being constantly reminded of all the ways I’m alienated from society. That doesn’t mean I have anything against other people. Envy them? Of course. Marvel at them? Constantly. Secretly study them? Every day. I just don’t get any closer to understanding them. And liking something you don’t understand, estranged from it without reason, longing to commune with it—who’d ask for it?”
― Joshua Ferris, To Rise Again at a Decent Hour

“Under "Activities and Interests," it was written "Boston Red Sox." The Boston Red Sox, an activity and an interest. Not a devotion to be suffered. Not a solemn vow in the off-season. Not a memorial to a dead man. Not a calling beyond reason. Just an interest. I take an interest in when they play, whether home or away, whether they win or lose--things like that. Maybe read about it in the paper the next morning. Millions of others just like me, taking an interest. Not "Coronaries and Rehabilitations." Not "Dedications and Forfeitures." Not "Life and Death." "Activities and Interests." This was how it was presented, in terrifying simplicity. What it was all reduced to, the thirty years, and the stupid tears, and every extra inning. An activity and an interest.”
― Joshua Ferris, To Rise Again at a Decent Hour

“Why not just go with it? Just walk the dog and send the tweets and eat the scones and play with the hamsters and ride the bicycles and watch the sunsets and stream the movies and never worry about any of it? I didn’t know it could be that easy. I didn’t know that until just now. That sounds good to me. I think I might be able to do that. Who couldn’t do that? It would take somebody mentally ill not to do that, and I’m not mentally ill.”
― Joshua Ferris, To Rise Again at a Decent Hour

“Things Could Be Worse And Things Could Be So Much Better—that became the game, my running commentary on the streets of Manhattan, and I played it as well as the other slobs just trying to get by.”
― Joshua Ferris, To Rise Again at a Decent Hour