Perv - A Love Story Quotes

“Sometimes what I did five minutes ago scared the fuck out of me five minutes later.”
― Jerry Stahl, Perv - A Love Story

“There's no deodorant for desperation.”
― Jerry Stahl, Perv - A Love Story

“...it's not what people do, it's what they don't tell you they do. That's what hurts. That's what you think about when the television signs off and you're still bright-eyed and bushy-tailed.”
― Jerry Stahl, Perv - A Love Story

“It's different to miss somebody when they're still alive. When they die it's like, 'Okay, I'm sad.' You're supposed to be sad. When they just go away, when they disappear, that's a different thing.”
― Jerry Stahl, Perv - A Love Story

“Half the reason I turned into a writer is you didn't have to show up anywhere. You could work naked.”
― Jerry Stahl, Perv - A Love Story

“Still... I would have hugged my mother if we were the kind of family who hugged. If touching her weren't impossible. If her subnightie waft was not so utterly, fatally repulsive. That's how much I loved her.”
― Jerry Stahl, Perv - A Love Story

“This is, I believe, what happens when people take their own lives. They're not killing themselves, they're killing the world. Either to spare it pain or to cause it some, depending.”
― Jerry Stahl, Perv - A Love Story

“In my family, misery didn't just love company, it wanted hostages.”
― Jerry Stahl, Perv - A Love Story

“There were mornings I thought drugs made me insane and mornings I thought they kept me from going that way.”
― Jerry Stahl, Perv - A Love Story

“The second time I took acid, I watched myself in the mirror for nine hours. What I realized, when I stared, was that my face looked exactly the same when I cried as when I laughed. After awhile I couldn't tell which I was doing. Relief was just pain inside out.”
― Jerry Stahl, Perv - A Love Story

“Booze has a different effect when you're, like, ten. Its doesn't round out the edges so much as wash you right out of the picture.”
― Jerry Stahl, Perv - A Love Story

“This was, I sometimes thought, the last gift my father gave me. And the best: His death stood out as the supreme-o excuse for fucking up, for being a successful fuck-up.”
― Jerry Stahl, Perv - A Love Story

“I wasn't sad after my father kissed the streetcar. If anything, it was a relief. Much as I missed him, his dying gave me an excuse to feel the way I already felt. Which was the way I felt right now, under the laundry room fluorescents: hollow, pissed off, wanting to be wherever I wasn't. Until I got there. Then I wanted to be somewhere else.”
― Jerry Stahl, Perv - A Love Story

“That's the thing about people you loved. They disappeared on you. I didn't know much at the ripe old age of fifteen and a half. But, for better or worse, I knew that.”
― Jerry Stahl, Perv - A Love Story

“There's two kinds of people, kid: the kind who pretend they are, and the kind who pretend they aren't. Take my advice and don't be neither.”
― Jerry Stahl, Perv - A Love Story

“Sometimes I think life's nothin' but sittin' around watchin' pretty go bad.”
― Jerry Stahl, Perv - A Love Story

“Heroin spread that soft blanket over everything. But once the blanket was ripped off, it took a layer of skin with it, leaving nothing but nerve ends screaming in the breeze.”
― Jerry Stahl, Perv - A Love Story

“Sometimes, it's like you know what people think: You know what they're thinking, and you know it's wrong. All you want to do if change their mind, but you can't.”
― Jerry Stahl, Perv - A Love Story

“Pat Boone still didn't cover public cunt-licks in Tips for Teens, and there really wasn't anybody to ask.”
― Jerry Stahl, Perv - A Love Story

“If I closed my eyes, I could almost count those soft hairs on the back of her neck. One day I'd even leaned forward, pretending to drop my pencil, and inhaled her until the top of my head started to steam. A scent of butterscotch wafted off of her, and it was all I could do not to plunge my face into her shag.”
― Jerry Stahl, Perv - A Love Story

“As far as I could tell, life was nothing but a forced march down a mined highway. Even if you did everything you were supposed to do, sooner of later if was your turn to step on a claymore.”
― Jerry Stahl, Perv - A Love Story

“A waft of sweet hash drifted by, and I wanted to float after it like Wimpy levitating at the scent of a hamburger.”
― Jerry Stahl, Perv - A Love Story

“I have to admit, I wasn't close to my old man when he was alive. He was hardly ever home. But now that he was gone, and I was back in Pittsburgh, I thought about him all the time. I felt closer to the guy since he'd been buried than I ever did when he was walking around above ground. I realized how much I loved him.”
― Jerry Stahl, Perv - A Love Story

“Mom lived in 709. Five doors down from 714, the number they stamped on Quaaludes.”
― Jerry Stahl, Perv - A Love Story

“Maybe the reason you can never go home again is that, once you're back, you can never leave...”
― Jerry Stahl, Perv - A Love Story

“In some odd gush of patriotism, my mother had once vomited on the Liberty Bell, the Statue of Liberty, and a bust of Benjamin Franklin in a single summer, aborting our vacation and causing my father to swear off historical sites until the day he died.”
― Jerry Stahl, Perv - A Love Story

“Women in movies from Hollywood's golden era dressed the way my mother did now. My entire childhood, she'd shown up at PTA meeting in bust-hugging sequins, the sight of which gave my father complicated facial twitches. She was flamboyant, really, in no other way. There was nothing Auntie Mame about her. Unless Auntie Mame had a penchant for public collapse.”
― Jerry Stahl, Perv - A Love Story

“She knew the secret of my creepiness.”
― Jerry Stahl, Perv - A Love Story

“From diapers on, I felt like there was something not good about me, but it was invisible to everybody but my mother. And whenever she looked at me, she had to let me know that she knew. That was her mission in life.”
― Jerry Stahl, Perv - A Love Story

“Death Anyway meant "What the hell, even Hemingway sucked on a shotgun..." Death Anyway, when you came down to it, meant why in God's name would you want to be Pre-Law, Pre-Med, or Pre-Anything, when any microbe could see that just being alive was no more than Pre-Death.(...) That was the world, to me. If you showed up - if you did what they told you to do - you'd still end up with your skull in bloody gauze or your balls hanging from a branch. So why bother? Nothing mattered. Death anyway...”
― Jerry Stahl, Perv - A Love Story