This is the biggest mistake I could think would save me. I wanted to give up the idea that I had any control. Shake things up. To be saved by chaos. To see if I could cope, I wanted to force myself to grow again. To explode my comfort zone.
I’ve been choking to death for years. By now this should be easy.
There are worse things you can do to the people you love than kill them. The regular way is just to watch the world do it. Just read the newspaper.
You tell yourself that noise is what defines silence. Without noise, silence would not be golden. Noise is the exception.
What’s burning down is a re-creation of a period revival house patterned after a copy of a copy of a copy of a mock Tudor big manor house. It’s a hundred generations removed from anything original, but the truth is aren’t we all?
What you see at fight club is a generation of men raised by women.
Just for the record, the weather today is calm and sunny, but the air is full of bullshit.
This is the worst problem with living history museums. They always leave the best parts out. Like typhus. And opium. And scarlet letters. Shunning. Witch-burning.
Almost all the time, you tell yourself you’re loving somebody when you’re just using them. This only looks like love.
Everyone’s in their own personal coma.
The joke is, we all have the same punchline.
In light this bright, after so long in the dark, everything we can see is only black and white. Only glaring shape-outlines we have to blink against.
That’s how a scary story works. It echoes some ancient fear. It re-creates some forgotten terror. Something we’d like to think we’ve grown beyond. But it can still scare us to tears. It’s something you’d hoped was healed.
Telling some stories, Miss Leroy says, is committing suicide.
They assume she was once gorgeously beautiful. Because now she looks so – bad.
The world will always punish the few people with special talents the rest of us don’t recognize as real.
Sometimes you do something, and you get screwed. Sometimes it’s the things you don’t do, and you get screwed.
Leonardo’s Mona Lisa is just a thousand thousand smears of paint. Michelangelo’s David is just a million hits with a hammer. We’re all of us a million bits put together the right way.
It’s so quiet this high up, the feeling you get is that you’re one of those space monkeys. You do the little job you’re trained to do. Pull a lever. Push a button. You don’t understand any of it, and then you just die.
Hey, you created me! I didn’t create some loser alter-ego to make myself feel better. Take some responsibility!