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.
You have decided being scared is caused mostly by thinking.
I have filled 3 Mead notebooks trying to figure out whether it was Them or Just Me.
There are no choices without personal freedom, Buckeroo. It’s not us who are dead inside. These things you find so weak and contemptible in us – these are just the hazards of being free.
I had four hundred thousand pages of continental philosophy and lit theory in my head. And by God, I was going to use it to prove to him that I was smarter than he was.
To make someone an icon is to make him an abstraction, and abstractions are incapable of vital communication with living people.
Dostoevski informs everybody; or he ought to.