Artificial over stimulations seemed like the perfect way to stifle a generation of young people who wanted more and more from a world where less and less was available.
When you have insomnia, you’re never really asleep, and you’re never really awake. With insomnia, nothing’s real. Everything is far away. Everything is a copy of a copy of a copy.
She kept hoping that something would happen to rescue her from her own small-scale, predictable dreams.
The mistakes we make in our youth,” she said solemnly, “we pay for with the rest of our lives.
At some point, Wax mentioned how appalling it seemed that those brilliant minds who could invent miracle medicines and nuclear fission and dazzling computer special effects, they had such a complete lack of imagination when it came to spending their money: granite countertops and luxury cars. Talking about that stuff, Wax driving, the madder he got, you could watch the speedo creep up past eighty, ninety, a hundred.
We fight wars. We fight for peace. We fight hunger. We love to fight. We fight and fight and fight, with our guns or mouths or money. And the planet is never one lick better than it was before us.
It only takes one mistake,′ the Dan Banyan guy says, ‘and nothing else you ever do will matter.’ With his empty hand, he takes one of my hands. His fingers feel hot, fever-hot, and pounding with his heartbeats. He turns my hand palm-up saying, ‘No matter how hard you work or how smart you become, you’ll always be known for that one poor choice.’ He sets the blue pill on my palm, saying, ‘Do that one wrong thing- and you’ll be dead for the rest of your life.
She’d never trusted her own natural impulses and instincts Among her greatest fears was the possibility that she might never discover and develop her deepest talents and intuitions. Her special gifts. Her life would be wasted in pursuing the goals set for her by other people. Instead, she wanted to reclaim a power and authority – a primitive, irresistible force – that transcended gender roles. She dreamed of wielding a raw magic that predated civilization itself.
A happy past cripples people. They cling to it with nowhere better to go. Nothing to improve upon.
The skin along the parts in her hair, the skin above and behind the doctor’s ears, is as clear and white as the skin inside her other tan lines must look. If women knew how their ears come across, the firm fleshy edge, the little dark hood at the top, all the smooth contours coiled and channeling you to the tight darkness inside, well, more women would wear their hair down.
Here in the bathroom with me are razor blades. Here is iodine to drink. Here are sleeping pills to swallow. You have a choice. Live or die. Every breath is a choice. Every minute is a choice. To be or not to be. Every time you don’t throw yourself down the stairs, that’s a choice. Every time you don’t crash your car, you reenlist.
Hoard food and it rots. Hoard money and you rot. Hoard power and the nation rots.
By the time you turn thirty, your life is about escaping the person you’ve become in order to escape the person you’ve become in order to escape the person you started as.
You realize that our mistrust of the future makes it hard to give up the past. We can’t give up our concept of who we were. All those adults playing archaeologist at yard sales, looking for childhood artifacts, board games, CandyLand, Twister, they’re terrified. Trash becomes holy relics. Mystery Date. Hula Hoops. Our way of getting nostalgic for what we just threw in the trash, it’s all because we’re afraid to evolve. Grow, change, lose weight, reinvent ourselves. Adapt.
Black-and-white chickens stagger around Colonial Dunsboros, chickens with their heads flattened. Here are chickens with no wings or only one leg. There are chickens with no legs, swimming with just their ragged wings through the barnyard mud. Blind chickens without eyes. Without beaks. Born that way. Defective. Born with their little chicken brains already scrambled. There’s an invisible line between science and sadism, but here it’s made visible.
I figured I’d spend my first thousand years of Hell in some entry-level position, but after that I wanted to move into management. Be a real team player. Hell is going to see enormous growth in market share over the next millennium. I wanted to ride the crest. The agent said that sounded pretty realistic.
Listening, it occurred to Randall that the love people feel for animals is the purest form of love. Loving an animal, a horse, cat, or dog, was always a romantic tragedy. It meant loving something that would die before you. Like that movie with Ali McGraw. There was no future, just the affection of the present moment. You didn’t expect a big payoff, someday.
And when they’re old enough I’m going to tell my little girls that everybody looks a little crazy if you’re looking close enough, and if, you can’t look that close then you don’t really love them. All the while life goes around. And if you keep waiting for somebody perfect you’ll never find love, because it’s how much you love them is what makes them perfect.
The people who really, actually loved us, they’d beg us to go. To fulfill our dreams. Practice our craft. And they would love us when we all came back.
Really, there is no wrong. Not in our own minds. Our own reality. You can never set off to do the wrong thing. You can never say the wrong thing. In your own mind, you are always right. Every action you take – what you do or say or how you choose to appear – is automatically right the moment you act.