Loitering Quotes

“I've often thought that the unit of measure that best suits prose is the human breath”
― Charles D'Ambrosio, Loitering: New & Collected Essays

“By the strident and aggressive tenor of the talk you couldn’t tell if this Bonnie Hart entertained any doubt, then or ever, she was so careful not to cross herself, so careful to arrange her moral outrage along the lines of least resistance. In a sense the whole program was about Hart rendering the round world flat and endorsing lopsidedness, halfness. This seemed a crude and retrogressive project, since what really distinguishes us from apes is not the opposable thumb but the ability to hold in mind opposing ideas, a distinction we should probably try to preserve. But these days you get the impression people think it’s kind of recreant to waver, as if by feeling and expressing, or worst of all admitting, doubt and uncertainty, you’re being disloyal to a guiding idea.”
― Charles D'Ambrosio, Loitering: New and Collected Essays

“Being suicidal is really tiring. A lot of suicides are so lacking in affect and so lethargic that they aren’t able to kill themselves until their mood improves—spring, for that reason, has the highest rate of what people in the business call “completed” suicides.”
― Charles D'Ambrosio, Loitering: New & Collected Essays

“The canker of self-consciousness has been long in me, so like a lot of writers I not only do a thing, I see myself doing it too—it’s almost like not being alone. That morning our hero skipped in his skivvies down to the shore of the sea . . . it was dark . . . the fog . . . Storytelling!”
― Charles D'Ambrosio, Loitering: New & Collected Essays

“it’s nearly impossible to convey our deepest passions yet damned easy to share what’s dullest and worst about ourselves.”
― Charles D'Ambrosio, Loitering: New and Collected Essays

“What kind of damage is done to our ability to love or understand and thus fully judge one another when daily we’re encouraged to forget that people are people and view them instead as so much pasteboard, scenery, clutter, generalized instances (of murder, of rape, of embezzlement, etc.)?”
― Charles D'Ambrosio, Loitering: New and Collected Essays

“The poem’s not fragile. You can beat on it. It’s got good traction. Paraphrased, its four stanzas go like this: 1. You’re fucked. 2. We’re all fucked. 3. Why? 4. Let’s eat lunch.”
― Charles D'Ambrosio, Loitering: New and Collected Essays

“Fourier believed the world would eventually contain thirty-seven million poets equal to Homer, thirty-seven million mathematicians equal to Newton, and thirty-seven million dramatists equal to Molière—although, he admitted, these were only “approximate estimates.”
― Charles D'Ambrosio, Loitering: New and Collected Essays

“Loyalty—in its darkest form, which left so much death as its legacy to the twentieth century—rids the divided self of anxiety and guilt, so that murder smiles.”
― Charles D'Ambrosio, Loitering: New and Collected Essays

“In a curious twist, I realize I always knew TV news seemed full of shit, but I never knew it was, in fact, full of shit.”
― Charles D'Ambrosio, Loitering: New and Collected Essays

“One of the truths about suicide is that it’s hardly ever about the future. It’s the past the suicide can’t face, and although disgrace appears to be the exception, the one instance where suicide seems to be about the future, even in Oedipus, it’s her past Jocasta can’t accept, once it’s come to light.”
― Charles D'Ambrosio, Loitering: New & Collected Essays

“Meanwhile, back in the real world, my first instinct is a sort of stupid ducking motion I’ve learned from the movies, and I have the sure sense I’m going to be shot in the neck, where I feel particularly exposed and vulnerable.”
― Charles D'Ambrosio, Loitering: New & Collected Essays

“Accumulating enough subjectivities—setting them against each other—is as close as we’re going to come to objectivity, and this is why agreement is problematic: What’s the point of being right if it’s only safety in numbers?”
― Charles D'Ambrosio, Loitering: New and Collected Essays

“Why would anyone write a poem in this wrecked world? And really, how could they? Massive doubt, failed love, shitty thoughts, empty spirit, a dead history compelling a transfixed vision, these are devastations that might overwhelm and silence anyone; and silence, for a poet, is a prison. It’s where the descent hits bottom, it’s where the poet either faces or does not face all the risks of failed comprehension.”
― Charles D'Ambrosio, Loitering: New and Collected Essays

“Hatred’s destination is boredom, and boredom is perhaps a rebellion against time; it’s the finished putting up a fight with the end.”
― Charles D'Ambrosio, Loitering: New and Collected Essays

“After the onslaught of loss, both personal and historical, do we really believe a good lunch and an aesthetic perception settles the matter?”
― Charles D'Ambrosio, Loitering: New and Collected Essays

“life is a bad reason for including a character in a story.”
― Charles D'Ambrosio, Loitering: New and Collected Essays

“We shoot our heroes and enjoy peripeteia as a spectacle akin to sport and perhaps harshly disavowing the past protects us from the disappointment of our outsized hopes—who knows, really, but shifts in taste don’t fully account for the phenomenon. At any rate, nearly everything urgent and alive becomes doo-wop down the road, at least in this country’s pop culture, and along the way a somewhat self-hating irony lays waste not only to the work but to the desires it once carried. It’s like we die into adulthood.”
― Charles D'Ambrosio, Loitering: New and Collected Essays

“what really distinguishes us from apes is not the opposable thumb but the ability to hold in mind opposing ideas, a distinction we should probably try to preserve.”
― Charles D'Ambrosio, Loitering: New and Collected Essays

“You don’t really want to crash down the whole universe just to satisfy your situational unease or your incapacity to see the whole picture, do you? You don’t want a life based on your failure to understand life, right?”
― Charles D'Ambrosio, Loitering: New and Collected Essays

“The future requires kids; without them, there’s eventually no tomorrow. In time, of course, everybody runs out of tomorrows. The one thing you can say about the future, Joseph Brodsky has written, is that it won’t include you. That’s true, and yet the dyad of money and children plots you way out there in that world of tomorrows you don’t get. Your dream, then, is of a nothingness where an investment of love lives on. You believe in a time that’s not your own.”
― Charles D'Ambrosio, Loitering: New and Collected Essays

“As long as you could fall farther you distinguished yourself from the fallen. Loss reinstated possibility, but possibility without hope. And perhaps this explains how all of us blithely”
― Charles D'Ambrosio, Loitering: New and Collected Essays

“Everything died off and disappeared in that silent way only an eon can absorb and keep secret.”
― Charles D'Ambrosio, Loitering: New and Collected Essays

“We wake out of our dreams and wonder where the blood on our hands came from. Knowledge happens just about as often as shit, while innocence is probably returned to by taking yet another bite of the apple, not by pretending there never was a Fall in the first place.”
― Charles D'Ambrosio, Loitering: New and Collected Essays

“If you can love abstractly, you’re only a bad day away from hating abstractly.”
― Charles D'Ambrosio, Loitering: New and Collected Essays

“Abstract love is the nosy neighbor of abstract hate; they see right into each other’s windows and they always agree on everything.”
― Charles D'Ambrosio, Loitering: New and Collected Essays

“Alone, you’re vastly outnumbered; but in the company of another, by some weird miracle of human math, the odds seem wonderfully improved in your favor.”
― Charles D'Ambrosio, Loitering: New and Collected Essays

“And while of course everyone, even the most wrecked and destitute among us, has a unique personal history, the problematic nature of trying to gather information about people who’ve severed too many basic ties is this—that in a sense we truly have history only insofar as it’s shared, and too much uniqueness really leads away from individuality to anonymity, the great sea of the forgotten.”
― Charles D'Ambrosio, Loitering: New and Collected Essays

“You want to find yourself in the flow of time, miraculously relieved of your irrelevance.”
― Charles D'Ambrosio, Loitering: New and Collected Essays

“If I could intervene and change my own particular history would I alter past events in such a way that I'd bring Danny back to life? Would I return the single rimfire bullet to its quiet chamber in the gun and let the night of November 26, 19__, pass away in sleep and dreams or drink or television or whatever the anonymous bulk of history holds for most people? Would I uncurl the fingers from the grip, would I take away the pain, would I unwrite the note and slip the blank sheet back in the ream and return the ream to pulp and etc., would I exchange my own monstrous father for some kindly sap out of the sitcom tradition, would I do any of this, would I? And where would I be? Would I be there, in the room? Would my role be heroic? And where exactly would I begin digging into the past, making corrections, amending it? How far back do I have to go to undo the whole dark kit and kaboodle? I mean, from where I sit now I can imagine a vast sordid history finally reaching its penultimate unraveled state in the Garden, under the shade of the tree of knowledge, raising the question of whether or not I'd halt the innocent hand, leaving the apple alone, unbitten.”
― Charles D'Ambrosio, Loitering: New & Collected Essays