Attachments are of great seriousness. Choose your attachments carefully. Choose your temple of fanaticism with great care. What you wish to sing of as tragic love is an attachment not carefully chosen. Die for one person? This is a craziness. Persons change, leave, die, become ill. They leave, lie, go mad, have sickness, betray you, die. Your nation outlives you. A cause outlives you.
The thing about people who are truly and malignantly crazy: their real genius is for making the people around them think they themselves are crazy.
Drug addicts driven to crime to finance their drug addiction are not often inclined toward violent crime.
The neurology of failure. What if he was simply born and destined to live in the shadow of Total Fear and Despair, and all his so-called activities were pathetic attempts to distract him from the inevitable?
To presume that dictionary-making can somehow avoid or transcend ideology is simply to subscribe to a particular ideology, one that might aptly be called Unbelievably Naive Positivism.
What if, when Tracy Austin writes that after her 1989 car crash, ‘I quickly accepted that there was nothing I could do about it,’ the statement is not only true but exhaustively descriptive of the entire acceptance process she went through?
It’s always the same sort of grim windy Northeast November day where if you were at home you’d be eating earth-tone soups in a warm kitchen, listening to the wind and glad of home and hearth.
The whole quantum setup ends up being embarrassing in the special way something pretentious is embarrassing when it’s also wrong.
A question, doctor,” he said. “Why doesn’t the coyote take the money he spends on bird costumes and catapults and radioactive road runner food pellets and explosive missiles and simply go eat Chinese?” He smiled coolly. “Why doesn’t the coyote simply go eat Chinese food?
She was the kind of fatally pretty and nubile wraithlike figure who glides through the sweaty junior-high corridors of every nocturnal emitter’s dreamscape.
My own plan for the coming fourteen months is to knock on doors and stuff envelopes. Maybe even to wear a button. To try to accrete with others into a demographically significant mass. To try extra hard to exercise patience, politeness, and imagination on those with whom I disagree. Also to floss more.
Few artists dare to try to talk about ways of working toward redeeming what’s wrong, because they’ll look sentimental and naive to all the weary ironists.
The amount of organization and toiletry-lugging he has to do to get secretly high in front of a subterranean outtake vent in the pre-supper gap would make a lesser man quail.
Every two or three generations the world gets vastly different, and the context in which you have to learn how to be a human being, or to have good relationships, or decide whether or not there is a God, or decide whether there’s such a thing as love, and whether it’s redemptive, become vastly different. And the structures with which you can communicate those dilemmas, or have characters struggle with them, seem to become appropriate and then inappropriate again and so on.
Once he’d been set off inside, it mattered so much that he was somehow afraid to show how much it mattered.
That you just naturally want what we, your fathers, work night and day to make sure you want? Grow up, for Christ’s sake. Join the world. We produce what makes you want to need to consume. Advertising. Laxatives. HMO’s. Baking soda. Insurance. Your fears are built – and your wishes, on that foundation.
Doctors tend to enter the arenas of their profession’s practice with a brisk good cheer that they have to then stop and try to mute a bit when the arena they’re entering is a hospital’s fifth floor, a psych ward, where brisk good cheer would amount to a kind of gloating. This.
I begin to feel as though my thoughts and voice here are in some way the creative products of something outside me, not in my control, and yet that this shaping, determining influence outside me is still me. I feel a division which the outside voice posits as the labor pains of a nascent emotional conscience.
My ambitions at this point are modest and mostly surround staying alive.
Francophones are never impressed that anyone else can speak French.