Sarcasm and compassion are two of the qualities that make life on Earth tolerable.
Everyone knows how to talk, and no one knows what to say.
Sentimental music has this great way of taking you back somewhere at the same time that it takes you forward, so you feel nostalgic and hopeful all at the same time.
Sometimes you know you’ve got a chance with a girl because she wants to fight with you. If the world wasn’t so messed up, it wouldn’t be like that. If the world was normal, a girl being nice to you would be a good sign, but in the real world, it isn’t.
I'm very good at the past. It's the present I can't understand.
Maybe we all live life at too high a pitch, those of us who absorb emotional things all day, and as mere consequence we can never feel merely content: we have to be unhappy, or ecstatically, head-over-heels happy, and those states are difficult to achieve within a stable, solid relationship.
I’d stay there, or not, and I’d eat, or not, and I’d drink, or not, and go home, or not, and what I did or didn’t do wouldn’t matter to anyone at all. And I walked for most of the day. Do people get sad on holiday sometimes? I can imagine they do, having all that time to think.
I suddenly had a little epiphany: all the books we own, both read and unread, are the fullest expression of self we have at our disposal.
Record stores can’t save your life. But they can give you a better one.
What came first – the music or the misery? Did I listen to the music because I was miserable? Or was I miserable because I listened to the music? Do all those records turn you into a melancholy person?
It’s a mystery of human chemistry and I don’t understand it, some people, as far as their senses are concerned, just feel like home.
I can see that now. I can see everything once it’s already happened – I’m very good at the past. It’s the present I can’t understand.
Not for the first time in my life, and certainly not for the last, a self-righteous gloom had edged out all semblance of logic.
It’s brilliant, being depressed; you can behave as badly as you like.
You don’t ask people with knives in their stomachs what would make them happy; happiness is no longer the point. It’s all about survival; it’s all about whether you pull the knife out and bleed to death or keep it in...
There isn’t so much to be afraid of, out there. I can remember thinking it was funny to find that out, on the last night of my life; I’d spent the rest of it being afraid of everything.
It’s no wonder we’re all such a mess, is it? We’re like Tom Hanks in Big. Little boys and girls trapped in adult bodies and forced to get on with it.
Telling me I can do anything I want is like pulling the plug out of the bath and then telling the water it can go anywhere it wants. Try it, and see what happens.
One thing about great art: it made you love people more, forgive them their petty transgressions. It worked in the way that religion was supposed to, if you thought about it.
For alarmingly large chunks of an average day, I am a moron.