In a way, being an addict is very proactive. A good addiction takes the guesswork out of death. There is such a thing as planning your getaway.
In her experience every man thought he was a natural dancer, and every one thought he was good in bed. The truth was that most men only knew one dance step – usually the pogo – and between the sheets they were like a monkey in a nature film poking at an anthill with a stick.
You can’t be beautiful until you feel beautiful.
If you never been rabid, you ain’t never lived.
What they don’t teach you in art school is never, ever to tell people you wanted to be an artist. Just so you know, for the rest of your life, people will torture you by saying how you used to love to draw when you were young. You used to love to paint. A couple drinks. A couple aspirin. Repeat.
I’m the one who still needs rewriting. Don’t we all?
Everything is a copy of a copy of a copy.
So this is why I write. Because most times, your life isn’t funny the first time through. Most times, you can hardly stand it.
You’re that tree falling in the forest that nobody gives a rat’s ass about.
No memory is anything more than a personal choice.
Rachel hadn’t invented the dangers of toxoplasmosis; she’d gone online and built an airtight case. This wasn’t crazy talk. Neurobiologists had linked T. gondii to suicide and the onset of schizophrenia. All caused by exposure to cat poop. Some studies even suggested that the toxo brain parasites chemically coerced people to adopt more cats. Those crazy cat ladies were actually being controlled by an infection of single-cell invaders.
This whole time, I was calm. I was the picture of calm. I never, never panicked. I saw my blood and snot and teeth splashed all over the dashboard the moment after the accident, but hysteria is impossible without an audience. Panicking by yourself is the same as laughing alone in an empty room. You feel really silly.
Do something only for money, and you’re less likely to do it for free.
The ice-cold way death can hit you in the noontime of a sunny day just when you’d never expect.
His Highness looks at Denny and says, “Those glasses you’re wearing, do you need them?” “Only to see with,” Denny says.
Aim low and you won’t be disappointed.
Penny wanted this kind of attention from the world. She wanted people everywhere to know her name and to love her. There, she’d admitted it aloud. But she couldn’t do anything that would justify such massive public acclaim. She just needed a mentor, a teacher, someone to discover her.
Time legitimizes the outrageous.
I liked it better when you couldn’t be so sure. When terrifying rumors were distant enough to be a UFO at the bottom of Loch Ness. When the horribly compelling train-wreck tragedies of less fortunate people’s lives were only as real as you let them be. Just a cover of a magazine, a black-and-white photo on some late-night commercial for a charity. Now confirmation is just a mouse click away.
Good news didn’t seem real until you’d told at least a dozen friends.