The joke is, we all have the same punchline.
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.
Some mythological fat asswipe drives our national economy.
Hey, you created me! I didn’t create some loser alter-ego to make myself feel better. Take some responsibility!
To repeat, the way you get to the huge, impossible yes is, you start collecting a lot of easy, small yeses.
This isn’t about love as in caring. This is about property as in ownership.
No matter what else you came up against, if you could smile and laugh while a monkey did you with chestnuts in a dank concrete basement while somebody took pictures, well, any other situation would be a piece of cake.
We’ve taken the world apart but we have no idea what to do with the pieces.
Fathers. Mothers. With all their caring and attention. They will f – you up, every time.
These days, most of the people you hear laughing are dead.
Beginning with Santa in infancy, and ending with the Tooth Fairy as the child acquires adult teeth. Or, plainly put, beginning with all the possibility of childhood, and ending with an absolute trust in the national currency.
Where we’re standing right now, in the ruins in the dark, what we build could be anything.
The photographer in my head says: Give me peace. Flash. Give me release. Flash.
The difference between how you look and how you see yourself is enough to kill most people. And maybe the reason vampires don’t die is because they can never see themselves in photographs or mirrors.