We’re not keen on the idea of the story sharing its valence with the reader. But the reader’s own life “outside” the story changes the story.
I love the way you love, but I hate the way I’m supposed to love you back.
This appetite to choose death by pleasure if it is available to choose – this appetite of your people unable to choose appetites, this is the death.
Stated as an English sentence, of course, this is just a banal platitude-but the fact is that, in the day-to-day trenches of adult existence, banal platitudes can have life-or-death importance. That may sound like hyperbole, or abstract nonsense.
For those who’ve never experienced a sunrise in the rural midwest, it’s roughly as soft and romantic as someone’s abruptly hitting the lights in a dark room.
American experience seems to suggest that people are virtually unlimited in their need to give themselves away, on various levels. Some just prefer to do it in secret.
It’s like a fugue of evaded responsibility.
Worship your body, beauty, and sexual allure and you will die a million deaths before they finally grieve you.
I cannot say what color Lenore Beadsman’s eyes are; I cannot look at them; they are the sun to me.
There are secrets within secrets, though – always.
To experience commitment as the loss of options, a type of death, the death of childhood’s limitless possibility, of the flattery of choice without duress-this will happen, mark me. Childhood’s end.
The assumption that you everyone else is like you. That you are the world. The disease of consumer capitalism. The complacent solipsism.
The individual’s right to pursue his own vision of the best ration of pleasure to pain: utterly sacrosanct.
She wanted only tall smooth bottles whose labels spoke of Proof.
He knew what the Beats know and what the great tennis player knows, son: learn to do nothing, with your whole head and body, and everything will be done by what’s around you.
My bones are ringing the way sometimes people say their ears are ringing, I’m so tired.
Truly decent, innocent people can be taxing to be around.
So which is the lie? Hard or soft? Silence or time?
All I’m saying is that it’s shortsighted to blame TV. It’s simply another symptom. TV didn’t invent our aesthetic childishness here any more than the Manhattan Project invented aggression.
Hal Incandenza has an almost obsessive dislike for deLint, whom he tells Mario he sometimes cannot quite believe is even real, and tries to get to the side of, to see whether deLint has a true z coordinate or is just a cutout or projection.