Everything Matters! Quotes

“Everything ends, and Everything matters.

Everything matters not in spite of the end of you and all that you love, but because of it. Everything is all you’ve got…and after Everything is nothing. So you were wise to welcome Everything, the good and the bad alike, and cling to it all. Gather it in. Seek the meaning in sorrow and don’t ever turn away, not once, from here until the end. Because it is all the same, it is all unfathomable, and it is all infinitely preferable to the one dreadful alternative.”
― Ron Currie Jr., Everything Matters!

“And knowing that the only alternative to your grief is the nothingness that’s fast approaching, you try to embrace your own sorrow, to be open and empty and let it all pass through you. This is the key, you have learned – to relinquish control, to relinquish the desire for control. Even in this late drama, to try to control is to go mad. And so you do your best to let it all go.”
― Ron Currie Jr., Everything Matters!

“You wish they understood, as you do, that there is no escape and never was, that from the moment two cells combined to become one they were doomed. You wish they understood that there is joy in this fact, greater joy and love in just this one last moment than they experienced in the entirety of their lives. Because even in this last moment there is still Everything, whole galaxies and eons, the sum total of every experience across time, shrunk to the head of a pin, theirs for the asking, right here, right now. And so anything, anything, anything is possible.”
― Ron Currie Jr., Everything Matters!

“Your relationship with your brother will be, in many ways, the most complex and bewildering of all the interpersonal connections you will form. An older brother is both authority and peer, friend and bitter enemy, partner and rival, and will play these contradictory roles to varying degrees throughout your life. At this point the rivalry is most prominent, owing to the difference in age and the resentment your brother feels toward you monopolizing your mother's attention. Try to remember, in the face of the poor treatment you receive at his hands, that more than a pure desire to cause you harm or pain, this is an effort on his part to win back some of that attention, even if it's only through being scolded and punished.”
― Ron Currie Jr., Everything Matters!

“Love, in its purest form, is biology.”
― Ron Currie Jr., Everything Matters!

“All of which raises the question – your task, burden, privilege, call it what you like – a question which men and women, great and not-so of every color, creed and sexual persuasion have asked since they first had the language to do so, and probably before: Does Anything I Do Matter?”
― Ron Currie Jr., Everything Matters!

“...no one likes change unless it is from sommething bad to something good...”
― Ron Currie Jr., Everything Matters!

“The urge to move is natural and understandable. As will be the case throughout your life, no matter how long or brief, the choice is, in the end, yours. Simply bear in mind that most every choice will have consequences, and in this instance those consequences would likely be quite grave.”
― Ron Currie Jr., Everything Matters!

“Your life has more blue in it than a James Cameron movie.”
― Ron Currie Jr., Everything Matters!

“Our hearts may have broken in Nebraska but in Colorado they split open along the fractures, crumble to pieces, blow away. The peaks and green valleys, the lakes set at the foot of mountains like offerings. Beautiful and doomed and thus terrible.”
― Ron Currie Jr., Everything Matters!

“Partying means drinking. It also means playing records by Lou Reed and Chicago, which I thought was a city but is also a band it turns out.”
― Ron Currie Jr., Everything Matters!

“You could not be more correct. It does matter. All of it.”
― Ron Currie Jr., Everything Matters!

“It sounds stupid, but being angry all the time is making me angry.”
― Ron Currie Jr., Everything Matters!

“Everything matters not in spite of the end of you and all that you love, but because of it. Everything is all you’ve got—your wife’s lips, your daughter’s eyes, your brother’s heart, your father’s bones and your own grief—and after Everything is nothing. So you were wise to welcome Everything, the good and the bad alike, and cling to it all. Gather it in. Seek the meaning in sorrow and don’t ever ever turn away, not once, from here until the end. Because it is all the same, it is all unfathomable, and it is all infinitely preferable to the one dreadful alternative.”
― Ron Currie Jr., Everything Matters!

“At the bakery it's just me. It's a small place. Just me and the raspberry horns and the tourtiere pies and my cigarette going in the ashtray near the black sink. Every once in a while a car passes through the dark street outside the storefont windows, but that's pretty much all I see of people while I'm there, until the end of my shift at eight when Monica shows up to open the store for the day. A solid twelve hours by myself, nothing but the radio to keep me company, and I like it just fine, being alone. It's even better in the winter, during a storm, when the snow piles up outside and no cars come by at all. Inside the bakery it's warm and there's plenty to keep my hands busy. Times like that, for all I can tell I'm the only person left on earth. I could go on making pies and watching the snow pile up until the end of time, so long as there was enough coffee on hand. I don't need company like some people seem to.”
― Ron Currie Jr., Everything Matters!

“First, enjoy this time!”
― Ron Currie Jr., Everything Matters!

“In no time we roll into Sedona proper and find a Cirlce K. The place is full of men with silver ponytails and ratty sandals, old hippie women in loose flowing pants grinning vacantly as they molest the produce, and I am reminded of my old neighborhood in San Francisco. We buy enough fruit and bread and jerked meat for three days, as well as a couple spare handlers of SoCo and a big bottle of cheap Chianti for me. As I'm paying I wonder at how we cling so relentlessly to the little conventions like commerce, as though they can save us.”
― Ron Currie Jr., Everything Matters!

“...I'm not compromised by the ravages of adult recreation...”
― Ron Currie Jr., Everything Matters!

“But I'm afraid to move, convinced that everything going forward hinges on this moment, that whatever we become, or fail to become, is entirely dependent on what happens in the next few seconds.”
― Ron Currie Jr., Everything Matters!

“no matter how long you live, no matter how mature or philosophical you may grow to be, almost all sudden enlightenment will feel precisely this way, like a boot in the stomach, like acid on your tongue, and the sooner you accept this the better off you’ll be.”
― Ron Currie Jr., Everything Matters!

“instead of venting my anger, which is really just hurt dressed up for a night on the town, I ask if anyone needs a drink.”
― Ron Currie Jr., Everything Matters!

“Over the years Amy’s family has become a cascade of domestic abuse: her father beat on her brother, who grew big and furious and beat on her mother, who had no one but Amy to vent her anger on. Based on this pattern, you’d think that if there were someone in the family after Amy, that someone would do well to take karate classes, or hit the weights.”
― Ron Currie Jr., Everything Matters!

“Maybe what really bothers me is that guys like Dan never own up to their mistakes, never accept their lives as they are today, with all the accumulated blunders that brought them to this place and time. In some fundamental way they are not really here. They’re in a past that never really existed, or a future that never will exist, even while their bodies are in the present, in this warehouse, loading real packages onto real semis, with real wives and children at home, and very real opportunities for small but meaningful pleasures all around them.”
― Ron Currie Jr., Everything Matters!

“But these tests disclose nothing, because no test has yet been invented that can reveal a patient is suffering from the soul-dread caused by knowledge of the impending end of all existence”
― Ron Currie Jr., Everything Matters!

“Everything matters not in spite of the end of you and all that you love, but because of it.”
― Ron Currie Jr., Everything Matters!

“Everything ends, and Everything matters.”
― Ron Currie Jr., Everything Matters!

“And I will miss you, Mom and Dad and yes Oscar and my friends, especially Andrea, and of course Junior, sweetheart, poor, poor thing, I will miss you the most and I wish to God there were some way you could not be sad. I wish I could tell you there’s nothing sad at all in death, but I can’t. I can’t. Because I’m nothing.”
― Ron Currie Jr., Everything Matters!

“Our hearts may have broken in Nebraska but in Colorado they split open along the fractures, crumble to pieces, blow away. The peaks and green valleys, the lakes set at the foot of mountains like offerings. Beautiful and doomed and thus terrible.”
― Ron Currie Jr., Everything Matters!

“Though you consider the situation with Amy to be the biggest problem in your life at the moment, there are other issues you ought to be paying more attention to. We’re referring, of course, to your state of mind. While we’re willing to accept our portion of the responsibility for your general pessimism, we would be remiss if we didn’t point out that you are also undergoing dramatic changes in brain chemistry brought on by heavy, prolonged alcohol and drug consumption.”
― Ron Currie Jr., Everything Matters!

“The restaurant gets quiet and the bartender turns the television up high enough for everyone to hear. It’s President Huckabee”
― Ron Currie Jr., Everything Matters!