Reboot Quotes

“Where will you be when your apocalypse comes calling? Will you see it bearing down on you from a distance, filling the horizon and sky like a fire or like God? Will it rise up from beneath you like floodwater or burst forth from within like pent-up love? Will you run or bid welcome? Will you know its name and, more important, will it know yours?”
― Justin Taylor, Reboot: A Novel

“As D. W. Winnicott once said, “The catastrophe you fear will happen has already happened.” And maybe I picked that up at an AA meeting (yes, I’ve quit trying to skate by on white-knuckle YouTube) or maybe Molly remembered that Roland Barthes quotes it in Mourning Diary, his book about the death of his mother, which she gave me a copy of to read when I was grieving Shayne.”
― Justin Taylor, Reboot: A Novel

“We were peddling nostalgia for a past that had never existed in the name of a future that never would come to be. Conservatives loved that! It was the basis of their entire ideology.”
― Justin Taylor, Reboot: A Novel

“Hannah Arendt tells us that the ideology of fascism has no positive content but is rather a constant recursive motion around the void of belief. The only thing that keeps it going is inertia, so when someone pulls the emergency break, well, watch out.”
― Justin Taylor, Reboot: A Novel

“You’ll have to believe me that I haven’t been withholding this to be coy, or because I was scared to face this story, though it’s possible that both those things are true. I’ve held off telling it because I believe that when you speak, you are always also listening—or you should be. You are trying, in a sense, to “overhear” yourself, and so to be changed by what you have heard yourself reveal no less than if someone other than yourself were the one revealing it to you. Revelation was what I was afraid of: self-knowledge and change. Molly said Harold Bloom said that this capacity for self-overhearing is what Shakespeare’s characters do in their soliloquies—they listen to themselves, are changed, and then act based on that change—and that this is the foundation of modern human consciousness. Or something. I’m not saying I followed it all, but I did take the trouble later to peruse the relevant Wikis, where I learned that Bloom borrowed this idea from Hegel. Or maybe what I really did was hire Molly to ghostwrite this whole book for me, and here she is throwing in Easter eggs that reveal her unacknowledged legislation of my story.”
― Justin Taylor, Reboot: A Novel

“I’ve held off telling it because I believe that when you speak, you are always also listening—or you should be. You are trying, in a sense, to “overhear” yourself, and so to be changed by what you have heard yourself reveal no less than if someone other than yourself were the one revealing it to you. Revelation was what I was afraid of: self-knowledge and change. Molly said Harold Bloom said that this capacity for self-overhearing is what Shakespeare’s characters do in their soliloquies—they listen to themselves, are changed, and then act based on that change—and that this is the foundation of modern human consciousness. Or something. I’m not saying I followed it all, but I did take the trouble later to peruse the relevant Wikis, where I learned that Bloom borrowed this idea from Hegel. Or maybe what I really did was hire Molly to ghostwrite this whole book for me, and here she is throwing in Easter eggs that reveal her unacknowledged legislation of my story.”
― Justin Taylor, Reboot: A Novel

“There is another saying. I don’t think Varga said it, and it doesn’t sound like Lenin, either. It’s the thing about the direction that the angel of history faces, what it sees from where it’s standing. Something about paradise and a storm. I should google that, I thought. Or text Molly and ask her; she’d know. But I didn’t want to bother Molly, and maybe I didn’t need to. Paradise and a storm? Sounded like Florida. Let’s attribute the quote to Carl Hiaasen and move along.”
― Justin Taylor, Reboot: A Novel

“The future was certain, only the past was unpredictable. I wanted to attribute that quote to Lenin. In fact, it was something David Thewlis said as V. M. Varga, archvillain of the uneven third season of the TV reboot of the Coen brothers’ movie Fargo. The attribution was Varga’s, and if memory served, the person to whom he said it had questioned the veracity of the quote.”
― Justin Taylor, Reboot: A Novel

“What was this future we were flailing toward, with its fires and floods? Its rolling blackouts and tornadoes? Where was the reboot on this? The plot twist, the science fiction dream turned real scientific breakthrough, that would make everything okay? Where were the venture capitalists with their cold fusion and their wind farms? Their plastic-digesting bacteria? Their CRISPR-driven vaccination platforms? Their cancer-curing pills? Were we all really just going to keep fumbling along through these storms of the centuries of the weeks? What would it look like when the power went out for the last time? When there was no one left to put the poles and wires back up? All those empty unlit rooms, all the rats and pigeons starving, and the subway tunnels full of water, a new species of blind shark taking dominion of the thousands of miles of man-made sea caves, reefs in the stalled cars whose windows had shattered under the pressure of all that water, and the broken glass worn smooth by time, and all the subway stairs become oyster beds, anemone tendrils adrift in the current—all those gorgeous impossible colors, a true new Eden, except of course that it would all be happening in absolute darkness, with nobody there to bear it witness, to register the beauty and terror of nature repairing itself. Who would rub the condensation from his dive mask and stare stupefied? Who would catch the silver gleam of scale or white teeth full of bloody shredded spoil in a dive-rated flashlight’s sun-bright beam? I got out of the pool, dried off, went downstairs, took a quick rinse, drank some water, and got into bed, whereupon I fell fast asleep and into uneasy chlorine dreams.”
― Justin Taylor, Reboot: A Novel

“Be a good guy, David Crader,” she said. “Don’t drink any more chlorine. Or gin. It’s tempting to believe the scientists when they say that science will solve all the problems science has caused, but you just learned the truth firsthand: underwater breathing is worthless if the water is full of poison.”
― Justin Taylor, Reboot: A Novel

“As for Molly, she had her service industry allegiance and her Bernie-ish convictions, but she was still young enough to believe that the worst thing a cool person could do in this world was say something boring and obvious, even if it happened to be true. And though she knew that making earnestness uncool was part of the power structure’s master plan to undermine social movements, which have no choice but to be earnest, she was enamored enough of her parents’ (or would it have been her grandparents’?) generation to hold the fundamentally Gen X conviction that jaded irony was deathless.”
― Justin Taylor, Reboot: A Novel

“And though thou notest from thy safe recess Old Friends burn dim, like lamps in noisome air, Love them for what they are; nor love them less, Because to thee they are not what they were.”
― Justin Taylor, Reboot: A Novel

“Derivative ideas are original,” Shayne said. “That’s like saying children aren’t original because they have parents. You just have to push things far enough. It’s like, what’s the word I want here—” “Evolution?” I offered. “Exactly!” Shayne said. “God, I’ve missed you, David.”
― Justin Taylor, Reboot: A Novel

“It wasn’t hard at all. She advertised her shifts on her Instagram: a place in Gowanus overlooking the canal. I flipped through some pictures. It looked like its former life, its pre-hipster life, had been as a driving school. In fact it was called Driving School; white backlit plastic sign that had clearly come with the lease. Classic gentrification move. The new bar names itself for the business it’s replacing. The irony is easy, the name is memorable, and you don’t have to pay to replace the sign. Bloodred swing door with an inset diamond window, wire mesh gridding the glass.”
― Justin Taylor, Reboot: A Novel

“Movies are like poems. You’re supposed to experience them in a single sitting, then let them rattle around in your mind long after. TV is like reading a novel, or playing a video game, or having a roommate. It’s this thing that’s going to be around for a while. It always wants to keep going—to be more, to give more, to tell more. There’s room for nooks and crannies. Bottle episodes. Winking callbacks across baffled time, like Amy Madison stuck as a rat for a whole season of Buffy or that one half-second shot of Superintendent Rawls in the crowd at the gay bar in The Wire.”
― Justin Taylor, Reboot: A Novel

“Subconsciously, and then consciously, I had conspired to have her cut me loose, left her no other choice, not because I hadn’t wanted her anymore but because I hadn’t wanted to keep living in her world: the world of money and time. Fame Island. I would have died there, and I left in order to save myself. The fact that after leaving I spent the next several years almost dying in obscurity was ironic, sure, but it didn’t negate the truth of my original instinct. And anyway, here I was, alive, standing beside her at Ty’s grave.”
― Justin Taylor, Reboot: A Novel

“Wasn’t that, in a way, the big thing that white-knuckle CBT had taught me—to know when it was time to go?”
― Justin Taylor, Reboot: A Novel

“He lives in Portland, Oregon, and is largely retired from public life, though he does some voice acting for a video game that, unfortunately, I can’t tell you anything about because I am an adult woman who has had sex before.”
― Justin Taylor, Reboot: A Novel

“But the Portland–LA flight was barely two hours, and I wasn’t looking to root around in the archives of my memory palace. I was mulling and brooding, yes, but not over ancient history.”
― Justin Taylor, Reboot: A Novel

“I was capable of keeping bottles in the house, and sometimes when people offered me drinks I said no, No, thank you, not tonight. Saying no was simple, at least to the first round. My problem was—or rather, it had been—that once I said yes I wanted yes to last forever. Once I started, I didn’t stop.”
― Justin Taylor, Reboot: A Novel

“Hand coming out of pocket as he steps into the circle of light. Mostly he’s looking forward to never again being bored.”
― Justin Taylor, Reboot: A Novel

“The thing to understand is that meaning itself is a cultural hyperstition. He had to look that word up the first time he saw it in a post. What it means is, like, the reverse of a superstition, i.e., something a lot of people believe even though it isn’t true.”
― Justin Taylor, Reboot: A Novel

“My problem was—or rather, it had been—that once I said yes I wanted yes to last forever. Once I started, I didn’t stop.”
― Justin Taylor, Reboot: A Novel