The Ask Quotes

“We are going to eat ice cream and we are going to eat shit. The trick is to use different spoons.”
― Sam Lipsyte, The Ask

“Judging by your face, the what-the-fuck nodes in your cerebral cortex must be a real light show.”
― Sam Lipsyte, The Ask

“I'd become one of those mistakes you sometimes find in an office, a not unpleasant but mostly unproductive presence bobbing along on the energy tides of others, a walking reminder of somebody's error in judgement.”
― Sam Lipsyte, The Ask

“I was also one of those people who hadn’t caught up with the latest social networking site. Maura belonged to most of them. She passed most evenings befriending men who had tried to date-rape her in high school, but I was still stuck in the last virtual community, a sad place to be, like Europe, say, during the Black Death. Whenever I cruised this site, with its favorites lists and its paeans to somebody’s cousin’s gas station art gallery, I could not help but think of medieval corpses in the spring-thaw mud, buboes sprouted in every armpit and anus, black bile curling out of frozen mouths. Those of us still cursed with life wandered the blasted dales of this stricken network, wept and moaned and flogged ourselves with frayed AC adaptors, called out for God to strike us dead, or else let us find somebody who liked similar bands.”
― Sam Lipsyte, The Ask

“I was glad I'd remembered to shucksify my vocabulary in the company of children.”
― Sam Lipsyte, The Ask

“This country was built on the backs of dudes who drank on buses. What we do honors them.”
― Sam Lipsyte, The Ask

“The place resembled a new model prison, or one that had achieved a provisional utopia after principled revolt, or maybe a homeless shelter for people with liberal arts degrees. The cages brought to mind those labs with their death-fuming vents near my college studio. These kids were part of some great experiment. It was maybe the same one in which I'd once been a subject. Unlike me, though, or the guinea pigs and hares, they were happy, or seemed happy, or were blogging about how they seemed happy.”
― Sam Lipsyte, The Ask

“You’re growing up. All you need to remember is that nothing changes. New technology, new markets, global interconnectivity, doesn’t matter. It’s still the rulers and the ruled. The fleecers and the fleeced.” “Which are you?” “I’m a piece of expensive equipment. You, too. Maybe not so expensive. [...]”
― Sam Lipsyte, The Ask

“They weren’t like dolls, because dolls had no feelings. Kids had feelings, just not any remotely related to yours.”
― Sam Lipsyte, The Ask

“I felt as though I were snorting cocaine, or rappelling down a cliffside, or cliffsurfing off a cliff of pure cocaine.”
― Sam Lipsyte, The Ask

“You pay a whore to make you feel like a man, you fund a philharmonic to make yourself feel like a refined man.”
― Sam Lipsyte, The Ask

“Who exactly are we?' I asked.
The American Dreamers. There aren't too many of us left.'
I don't know if I qualify.'
You an American? Or want to be an American?'
I am an American.'
You said you were having a dream.'
It's true, I did.'
Was it the one where you're inside the girl and you are pumping her and pumping her and you are so happy but then it turns out it's not a girl, it's really one of those super poisonous box jellyfish, and it stings you and you are screaming and screaming and the sky rains the diarrhea of babies?'
The...no, I don't think so.'
I get that sometimes. Anyway, see you around.”
― Sam Lipsyte, The Ask

“We’d been walking in endless rectangles and now we were near the candy store again. The lights were out, the security gate down. We leaned up against the wall of a bank and I could feel the cool stone on my back, the billions of dollars thrumming through wires beneath and behind me, or on the night waves above. I wasn’t quite sure how they traveled. Or how much they got out anymore.”
― Sam Lipsyte, The Ask

“Oh, do you, Milo? You’re so selfish. You don’t see the bigger picture.” “What’s the bigger picture?” “You’re still here looking for handouts. Who’s going to take care of me?” “I’m on my knees here, Mom. Not for me, for my family. For my wife. For a beautiful grandson you have totally ignored.” “He’s kind of a brat. I’ll be in his life when he gets a little impulse control.” “He’s not even four.” “I have needs. I’m tired of this child-worshipping culture. You’re just a slave to it, Milo.” “I’m only trying to be a decent dad.” “Don’t waste your time. It’s not in your genes. Besides, try making some money. That might be a good dad move. For heaven’s sake, the system’s rigged for white men and you still can’t tap in.” “You’re right, Mom. What can I say? But still, it would mean a lot to me if you made a little more of an effort with Bernie.” “Bernie schmernie. This is my decade.” “Okay, you wrinkled old spidercunt, have it your way.”
― Sam Lipsyte, The Ask

“Yes,” said Cooley. “That is the question, as the Bard might say.” “The Bard?” “What’s so funny?” said Cooley. “Nothing, sir,” I said. “I just didn’t know people still used that term.” “Well, I’m a people, Burke. Am I not?” “Of course.” “If you prick me, do I not bleed, you scat-gobbling, mother-rimming prick?” Occasionally Dean Cooley reverted to a vocabulary more suited to his marine years, but some maintained it was only when he felt threatened, or stretched for time. “Yes, sir,” I said.”
― Sam Lipsyte, The Ask

“She liked reality shows the best, and then the shows that purported to be about reality.”
― Sam Lipsyte, The Ask

“I needed to talk to Vargina, to straighten this out, but felt suddenly faint, headed for the deli across the street. Just standing in the vicinity of comfort food was comfort. The schizophrenic glee with which you cold load your plastic shell with spinach salad, pork fried rice, turkey with cranberry, chicken with pesto, curried yams, clams casino, breadsticks, and yogurt, pay for it by the pound, this farm feed for human animals in black chinos and pleated chinos, animals whose enclosure included the entire island of Manhattan, this sensation I treasured deeply.”
― Sam Lipsyte, The Ask

“Lee was my father’s lawyer, a mensch. But he’s been very sick. Cancer. Pancreatic.” “That’s one of the worst. A killer.” “Yes, the ones that kill you are definitely the worst. [...]”
― Sam Lipsyte, The Ask

“So, yes, I should have just surrendered, cinched the entitled scion her little pouch of entitlements, put in my calls to the name shufflers, done my duty. I thought about that moment later on. Maybe I got extratuned to the concept of bitchhood once I became Purdy’s, though I must confess I’ve always found such usage of the term for female dogs distasteful. My mother was a second-wave feminist. I wasn’t comfortable saying “cunt” until I was twenty-three, at which point, admittedly, I couldn’t hold back for a time.”
― Sam Lipsyte, The Ask

“One night in the House of Drinking and Smoking we were victims of what I would later call a home invasion. I didn’t know the term then. I think I learned it later, from a rap song, or a movie based loosely on a newspaper columnist’s fear of a rap song.”
― Sam Lipsyte, The Ask

“Good. Now. Let’s talk our talk. Your beloved institution seems like it wants to step up to the next level. Be a culture player. Crank out all those smug nullities who can make the stylish, insipid, top-notch crap. Stuff we can jerk off to but that will also make us sorry, but not too sorry. Sexy sorry. Am I right?”
― Sam Lipsyte, The Ask

“A rich boy goes to college. He makes a lot of friends. They all think they are special and that they suffer in distinct ways, but they are all hurtling down the same world-historical funnel. They will attempt to professionalize their passions, or else just get jobs.”
― Sam Lipsyte, The Ask

“You said you were having a dream.” “It’s true, I did.” “Was it the one where you’re inside the girl and you are pumping her and pumping her and you are so happy but then it turns out it’s not a girl, it’s really one of those super poisonous box jellyfish, and it stings you and you are screaming and screaming and the sky rains the diarrhea of babies?” “The . . . no, I don’t think so.” “I get that sometimes. Anyway, see you around.”
― Sam Lipsyte, The Ask

“Fuck,” said Bernie. “Fuckwinky eyeballhead.” “No, Bernie. We don’t use those words.” “Which words?” “You know which words.” “You used them, Daddy.” “I made a mistake. I am sorry I said that word. It isn’t helping with our problem.” “What’s our problem?” “There may be no school today.” “That’s okay,” said Bernie. “It’ll be okay.” We weren’t sure where he had picked up that becalming phrase, probably from us, as we tried to talk ourselves out of the awful lucidity certain days afforded. The whole mirthless dwindle of things would suddenly pull into focus, the crabbed, moneyless exhaustion that stood in for our lives, and Maura and I would both start the chatter, the cheap pep: It’s okay, it’s going to be okay, we’ll get through this. When Bernie repeated these bromides, he sounded seventy years old. It broke your heart, as did about forty-three percent of the things Bernie said and did. About twenty-seven percent of the things he said and did made you want to scream and banish him to his childproofed room, or do much more heinous and ingenious things, just so he’d get the point, whatever the point could be with an almost-four-year-old, but still, to bury him alive and then save him at the last minute, or tell him that the state had passed a law against ice cream and he would go to prison if he even thought about it, because they now had the technology to detect illegal mint-chocolate-chip cogitation, had, in fact, the chips for it, seemed, if not conducive to his development, at least on some level deserved. Thirty percent of what Bernie said and did was either on the bubble or else utterly inscrutable, just the jolts and stutters of a factory-fresh brain working out the kinks.”
― Sam Lipsyte, The Ask

“They sought each other, missed each other, at cocktail parties, in train terminals, at flower shops, their fin de siecle Nokias gaining symbolic power with each scene.”
― Sam Lipsyte, The Ask