Fight No More Quotes

“He hated the American way of thought that said all things could be repaired, all things surmounted by a trick of attitude. History is trivial in this country, he said. Forgetting is the way to bliss. Ignorance is a badge of honor.”
― Lydia Millet, Fight No More: Stories

“Because boys, and later men, regardless of their best intentions often seemed to yearn for something they just never succeeded in defining. You pitied them for it, your heart went out to them, but still there was a chronic gap between what they should be and what they were capable of being. Into that gap civilization fell.”
― Lydia Millet, Fight No More: Stories

“He’d seen firsthand how raw parenting made you. Might as well strip your clothes off and run down High Street in a hail of gunfire.

That was being a parent.”
― Lydia Millet, Fight No More: Stories

“Course, you couldn’t say hard things, not when times were already hard. He knew that much. Only music could cross the divide. The brain’s hard wiring, probably, how music resonated—said everything while saying nothing at all. But he preferred to think of it in less scientific terms. Music, the hard currency of the soul.”
― Lydia Millet, Fight No More: Stories

“Ugly city, except where the rich lived. Los Angeles was stark like that. Ugly where money wasn’t, beautiful where it was. Well, not always. Along the beach even the rich lived in ugly buildings.”
― Lydia Millet, Fight No More: Stories

“She never understood why painters made ugly things. A, who wanted them in their house? This guy, obviously . . . who had no taste, or anyway was stuck in the nineties. And 2, it seemed like showing off. Like, hey, this is ugly! In your face. People were rude and called it art.”
― Lydia Millet, Fight No More: Stories

“Hating’s easy. Couldn’t be easier. It’s just a default setting. The easy way out. It’s all the rest that’s actually hard.”
― Lydia Millet, Fight No More: Stories

“Fear could turn you into a statue. Some people were statues all their lives. They feared the freedom of others, that others’ freedom could end up hurting them. A person might want to be free to do something to you, often. One man’s freedom was another man’s aggravated assault.”
― Lydia Millet, Fight No More: Stories

“Too often the future was somewhere else, a land where you might find yourself one day. There was no need to travel there on purpose. Easy to tell yourself the future could be staved off and nothing had to change: the present would stretch in a band of gold along the horizon, bright line joining the earth and sky.”
― Lydia Millet, Fight No More: Stories

“For him freedom meant doing exactly what you wanted all the time. Was that freedom for everybody?”
― Lydia Millet, Fight No More: Stories