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?
I think the world divides neatly into those who are excited by the managed induction of terror and those who are not. I do not find terror exciting. I find it terrifying.
Fervent Christians are always remembering themselves as – and thus, by extension, judging everyone else outside their sect to be – lost and hopeless and just barely clinging to any kind of interior sense of value or reason or even to go on living, before they were ’saved.
Trying to be anti-cool is just one exponent off trying to be cool – it’s the same beast.
American human beings are a slippery and protean bunch in real life, hard as hell to get any kind of universal handle on.
Our endless and impossible journey toward home is in fact our home.
I called a cab, still in my towel. I jumped in the cab before it had even stopped at the gate. I actually said, “The nearest library with a cutting-edge professional grief- and trauma-therapy section, and step on it.