No wonder we cannot appreciate the really central Kafka joke: that the horrific struggle to establish a human self results in a self whose humanity is inseparable from the horrific struggle. That our endless and impossible journey toward home is in fact our home.
I read,′ I say. ‘I study and read. I bet I’ve read everything you’ve read. Don’t think I haven’t. I consume libraries. I wear out spines and ROM drives. I do things like get in a taxi and say, “The library, and step on it.
Hell hath no fury like a coolly received postmodernist.
He said she went around with her feelings out in front of her with an arm around the feelings’ windpipe and a Glock 9mm. to the feelings’ temple like a terrorist with a hostage, daring you to shoot.
These worst mornings with cold floors and hot windows and merciless light – the soul’s certainty that the day will have to be not traversed but sort of climbed, vertically, and then that going to sleep again at the end of it will be like falling, again, off something tall and sheet.
They can kill you, but the legalities of eating you are quite a bit dicier.
He didn’t reject the idea so much as not react to it and watch as it floated away. He thought very broadly of desires and ideas being watched but not acted upon, he thought of impulses being starved of expression and dying out and floating dryly away.
I have felt as bleak as I’ve felt since puberty, and have filled almost three Mead notebooks trying to figure out whether it was Them or Just Me.
There’s been time this whole time. You can’t kill time with your heart. Everything takes time.
In life, the microphone passes your lips but once... you had better be ready to sing.
I have pointed rhythmically at the ceiling to the two-four beat of the same disco music I hated pointing at the ceiling to in 1977.
Ortho Stice played with a kind of rigid, liquid grace, like a panther in a back-brace.
In a nation whose great informing myth is that it has no great informing myth, familiarity equaled timelessness.
We’re a family that takes its home entertainment very seriously.
The really desolate areas can get pretty crowded, of course, sometimes, so it’s good to get there early, get as much wandering as you can in before noon.
None of this stuff is really about morality or religion or dogma or big fancy questions of life after death. The capital-T Truth is about life before death.
It is a fact of life that certain people are corrosive to others’ self esteem simply as a function of who and what they are.
I balked at trying antidepressants, I just couldn’t see myself taking pills to try to be less of a fraud.
This terror of silence with nothing diverting to do. I can’t think anyone really believes that today’s so-called ‘information society’ is just about information. Everyone knows it’s about something else, way down.
The happy pleasure of the person alone, yes?