One day the ordinariness will be terminally punctuated by the extraordinary full stop of death.
Life, like the boring drunk at the office party, keeps seeking you out, leaning on you, killing you with pointless yarns and laughing bad-breathed in your face at its own unfunny jokes.
There is no God and that’s His only commandment.
My parents believe in the happy endings to the stories of their children.
I’m too conceited for therapy.
Nothing holds love together like shared vice or collusive perversion.
I don’t know where the universe came from or what happens to creatures when they die. I don’t know if the whole thing’s an unravelling accident or an inscrutable design. I don’t know how one should live – but I know that one should live, if one can possibly bear it.
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.