If Im going to invest the time in a novel, I want something more than the entertainment you get out of most genre fiction.
I’m an American. We’re a people diseased with progress.
Life is nothing but a statement of what happens to be.
Every now and then life sold you an illusion of design. A coincidence, a parallel, a sledgehammer symbol. The goods were always faulty. You forked over the cash only to discover they’d fallen apart by the time you got home. But life kept at it. Life couldn’t help it. Life was a compulsive salesman.
Pain revealed the paltry dimensions of love. The paltry dimensions of everything, in fact, except pain.
My mother once told me she thought hell would be nothing more than being given a glimpse of God – then having it taken away, forever.
Bliss defies description, obviously, since it annihilates you, since you’re not there to experience it. You get the lead-up and the come-down, never the zenith.
Home pulls. It draws you back to tell you you don’t belong.
Poets suffer occasional delusions of angelhood and find themselves condemned to express it in the bric-a-brac tongues of the human world. Lots of them go mad.
Life compulsively dangled the possibility of life. Life, the dramatist on speed. Life, that couldn’t stop with its foreshadows and ironies and symbols and clues, its wretched jokes and false endings and twists. Life with its hopeless addiction to plot.
I hated the words. Each one was like a big live insect in my mouth.
No amount of violence you’ve done to others prepares you for violence done to yourself.
Telling the truth is a beautiful act even if the truth itself is ugly.
Pain is beyond reason, an obliterating giant stupidity to which all your history of jokes and nuance and ideas and caresses is nothing, simply nothing.
Nicotine and alcohol embraced in my system like long-parted siblings, grateful to me for reuniting them.
When you’re a kid it’s people’s cruelty that makes you cry, then when you’re an adult it’s their kindness.
We go to the past to lay the blame – since the past can’t argue. We go to our past selves to account for our present miseries.
We’re the worst thing because for us the worst thing is the best thing. And it’s only the best thing for us if it’s the worst thing for someone else.
I suppose the word “unbearable” is a lie by definition. Unless you kill yourself immediately after using it.
Only meaning can make a difference and we all know there’s no meaning. All stories express a desire for meaning, not meaning itself. Therefore any difference knowing the story makes is a delusion.