The Futilitarians Quotes

“December is the holdout month, all the others torn away.”
― Anne Gisleson, The Futilitarians: Our Year of Thinking, Drinking, Grieving, and Reading

“The power of female vanity should never be underestimated.”
― Anne Gisleson, The Futilitarians: Our Year of Thinking, Drinking, Grieving, and Reading

“Looking for truth implies a postulate that truth is worth looking for.”
― Anne Gisleson, The Futilitarians: Our Year of Thinking, Drinking, Grieving, and Reading

“Searching is a natural state for us animals.”
― Anne Gisleson, The Futilitarians: Our Year of Thinking, Drinking, Grieving, and Reading

“One of the most liberating things about aging... not focusing on the gaze anymore, you have more energy to focus on yourself.”
― Anne Gisleson, The Futilitarians: Our Year of Thinking, Drinking, Grieving, and Reading

“One of the worst things about aging was that no one looks at you anymore. You spend half a lifetime taking in the gaze, building part of your identity around it, and then the gaze, tenuous to begin with, disappears and you're removed from the larger network of physical desire.”
― Anne Gisleson, The Futilitarians: Our Year of Thinking, Drinking, Grieving, and Reading

“He loved Christmas... a sanctioned time to indulge his love of excess and family, his outsizes generosity.”
― Anne Gisleson, The Futilitarians: Our Year of Thinking, Drinking, Grieving, and Reading

“Everything to excess' was his motto, as he aggressively celebrated the holidays, overfilling Easter baskets and buying the biggest turkeys... Even if Catholicism didn't stick with me, celebratory ritual evidently did.”
― Anne Gisleson, The Futilitarians: Our Year of Thinking, Drinking, Grieving, and Reading

“As an adult, when you're with your siblings, part of you is always a child, attached to childhood patterns of behavior and associations. All the jokes and gestures, affections and resentments.”
― Anne Gisleson, The Futilitarians: Our Year of Thinking, Drinking, Grieving, and Reading

“All individuals are responsible for all human carnage... in other words, anyone can stand in the footprints of the assassin.”
― Anne Gisleson, The Futilitarians: Our Year of Thinking, Drinking, Grieving, and Reading

“A poem focuses and quiets the room like no other reading.”
― Anne Gisleson, The Futilitarians: Our Year of Thinking, Drinking, Grieving, and Reading

“I kept wanting to apologize to our tiny son about the state of the city.”
― Anne Gisleson, The Futilitarians: Our Year of Thinking, Drinking, Grieving, and Reading

“Besides, "existence" becomes less philosophical and more immediate in the face of natural disaster, as does "meaning." Disasters and evacuations are actually excellent exercises in life evaluation.”
― Anne Gisleson, The Futilitarians: Our Year of Thinking, Drinking, Grieving, and Reading

“She makes me feel like an amateur human.”
― Anne Gisleson, The Futilitarians: Our Year of Thinking, Drinking, Grieving, and Reading

“A hangover is the visceral reality of a price being extracted.”
― Anne Gisleson, The Futilitarians: Our Year of Thinking, Drinking, Grieving, and Reading

“She's an enthusiastic recorder of life - writes in her journal every prodigiously, loads her camera's SD cards with thousands of pictures. Her swooping, idiosyncratic half-print, half-cursive style scrawls on month after month, skipping lines between the scraps of the discussion that seem important enough to snatch and capture.”
― Anne Gisleson, The Futilitarians: Our Year of Thinking, Drinking, Grieving, and Reading

“It's easier to be someone else than to be yourself.”
― Anne Gisleson, The Futilitarians: Our Year of Thinking, Drinking, Grieving, and Reading

“Visiting my father at work was like visiting the main chamber of his person.”
― Anne Gisleson, The Futilitarians: Our Year of Thinking, Drinking, Grieving, and Reading

“His job has ruined moviegoing for him, as he frequently gives the industry twelve- or fourteen hour days and is loath to give it an extra ninety minutes during his off time. Sloppy decision making at the top means the bottom works weekends. Often it's someone in an office in L.A. deciding whether or not my husband makes it home for dinner.”
― Anne Gisleson, The Futilitarians: Our Year of Thinking, Drinking, Grieving, and Reading

“I grew up associating dads with suits, the uniform of men with offices.”
― Anne Gisleson, The Futilitarians: Our Year of Thinking, Drinking, Grieving, and Reading

“As you get older all the bodies of your stillborn selves may pile up around you, but every decision is also its own act of creation.”
― Anne Gisleson, The Futilitarians: Our Year of Thinking, Drinking, Grieving, and Reading

“Our failure of the one test God put before us, that of not enslaving other humans.”
― Anne Gisleson, The Futilitarians: Our Year of Thinking, Drinking, Grieving, and Reading

“The less true something is, the more powerful and potentially destructive it is.”
― Anne Gisleson, The Futilitarians: Our Year of Thinking, Drinking, Grieving, and Reading

“The letter suddenly seemed like my most important possession, and like all the real, handwritten, postally delivered letters these days, an instant relic from a previous era, before time and space collapsed and we started sending messages to each other's pockets.”
― Anne Gisleson, The Futilitarians: Our Year of Thinking, Drinking, Grieving, and Reading

“I guess men have always been built to disappoint.”
― Anne Gisleson, The Futilitarians: Our Year of Thinking, Drinking, Grieving, and Reading

“Most narrative is part purpose, parr accident, and the messiness of life always pulses against the myth.”
― Anne Gisleson, The Futilitarians: Our Year of Thinking, Drinking, Grieving, and Reading

“I'm in one of the few professions where one still encounters swaths of handwriting on a regular basis - education.”
― Anne Gisleson, The Futilitarians: Our Year of Thinking, Drinking, Grieving, and Reading

“Neighbors communicating concern and sharing news through stoop sitting and "door" popping... Technology, while a huge boon to rebuilding, also ensured that you didn't have to get your hands dirty, or even physically interact with the community... A digital echo chamber is not a stoop. A stoop is a stoop is a stoop.”
― Anne Gisleson, The Futilitarians: Our Year of Thinking, Drinking, Grieving, and Reading

“I'm usually grateful for how good conversation stirs up my head, in ways that solitary thinking or reading alone cannot.”
― Anne Gisleson, The Futilitarians: Our Year of Thinking, Drinking, Grieving, and Reading

“I could scribble away in a journal, I just couldn't share it with the world. A phenomenon one writer I know described as chewing and not swallowing.”
― Anne Gisleson, The Futilitarians: Our Year of Thinking, Drinking, Grieving, and Reading