Lot Six Quotes

“Pain was astringent and clarifying. Pain would burn away the mediocrity until all that was left in the world was a bright shining nucleus, a single electrified atom of human greatness. I wouldn’t be like my brothers, or my sister, or anyone in my family. I wasn’t part of a family—I wasn’t part of anything. I was living on the flickering border of life and death, real and imaginary. I was like Atlas, supporting an entire universe with the strength of my own mind, my will.”
― David Adjmi, Lot Six

“I worked until my body shook with fatigue; it was like I was training for an Olympic event. But I was getting smarter. I felt the ideas from different books and writers connecting and interleaving, building into a reticulate order inside me like arteries or veins.”
― David Adjmi, Lot Six

“We were just twenty years old, when anguish and its expression are still secrets to be buried. But the secrets gleamed in our eyes.”
― David Adjmi, Lot Six

“Nietzsche seemed deranged, but at the same time the derangement in the writing seemed urgent and potentially important. He was cruel, but there was something bracing and lucid in all the cruelty. “Almost everything we call higher cul- ture,” he wrote, “is based on the spiritualization and intensifi- cation of cruelty.” Could cruelty be spiritual and beautiful? Could cruelty, if you just intensified it, be a portal into culture?”
― David Adjmi, Lot Six

“I’d been holding on to the idea that if I worked hard in time my molecules would be replaced and I could be completely new—but what if this belief was delusional? What if I couldn’t learn from my failures and just move on? What if with all my running from the past I was like one of those protagonists from a Greek tragedy—like Oedipus, whose fate was unavoidable, who only got more trapped the more he tried to wrest himself from it? What if, like these tragic figures from literature, and like Richie, I too was programmed to self-destruct?”
― David Adjmi, Lot Six

“With my new hat, I spoke and moved differently, I became a different person—the way models in magazines apparently became different people with different essences when they changed outfits. Maybe fashion didn’t just change how you were seen, maybe it could actually change who you were. The self was an endless burden, like a giant piece of luggage you were forced to haul around. But what if there was a way to remove the burden? What if you could just erase the self you had, as though it were a drawing in pencil, and start over?”
― David Adjmi, Lot Six

“I wanted to see what he wanted me to see. My loyalty tendered imaginative lapses in perception. I’d ally with Howie however he needed, even if I never quite knew what was real or what was in his mind. It didn’t matter to me what was real, because my loneliness was alleviated. We lived in a bubble where true and false increasingly dropped their distinctions. It was the space of fantasy, and that space felt holy to me, just like the clothes at Charivari felt holy—clothes that were made for some fantasy body, a kind of personhood yet to be invented. The clothes opened the space for this person to spring into existence, just as Howie’s stories opened the space for us to become characters in them. The stories bonded us together—for if you shared the same fictions you shared the same reality.”
― David Adjmi, Lot Six

“It didn't matter that the nastiness of my actions was at war with my own feelings. People would fill in the motives with a story that suited their imaginings. My inner life was not relevant. All that was important was what was visible. And all that was visible to the adults conducting this human autopsy were my actions. I was buried inside these surface behaviors—crushed, as if by avalanche.”
― David Adjmi, Lot Six

“My loyalty tendered imagina- tive lapses in perception. I’d ally with Howie however he needed, even if I never quite knew what was real or what was in his mind. It didn’t matter to me what was real, because my loneliness was alleviated. We lived in a bubble where true and false increasingly dropped their distinctions. It was the space of fantasy, and that space felt holy to me, just like the clothes at Charivari felt holy—clothes that were made for some fantasy body, a kind of personhood yet to be invented. The clothes opened the space for this person to spring into existence, just as Howie’s stories opened the space for us to become characters in them. The stories bonded us together—for if you shared the same fictions you shared the same reality.”
― David Adjmi, Lot Six

“I felt something flip, like an air pressure change in my brain. I must’ve made a funny expression because Sebastian and Chris were laughing at me. The laughter was infectious, and eventually I was laughing so hard I fell off my chair. The room spun all around me. I was under the table, laughing and laughing. But even as I felt relaxed and happy there was a part of me that felt too relaxed, too at ease. My unmodulated display of enjoyment suddenly made me anxious. I felt scared they’d seen something in me I hadn’t wanted them to see.”
― David Adjmi, Lot Six