High Fidelity

Nick Hornby's novel for the music-obsessed. Turned into a movie, obviously.


"Those days are gone, and good fucking riddance to them; unhappiness really meant something back then. Now it's just a drag, like a cold or having no money."

"I stung, and I blushed, and I suddenly forgot how to walk without being aware of every single part of my body."

"It would be nice to think that as I've got older times have changed, relationships have become more sophisticated, females less cruel, skins thicker, reactions sharper, instincts more developed. But there still seems to be an element of that evening in everything that has happened to me since; all my other romantic stories seem to be a scrambled version of that first one. Of course, I have never had to take that long walk again, and my ears have no burned with quite the same fury, and I have never had to count the packs of cheap cigarettes in order to avoid mocking eyes and floods of tears...not really, not actually, not as such. It just feels that way, sometimes."
"Between the ages of fourteen and twenty-four, foreplay changes from something that boys want to do and girls don't, to something that women want and men can't be bothered with."

"Maybe it was best not to think about it too hard; I didn't want to feel sorry for anybody else except me."

"I'm not too sure why I wanted to fuck it all up for them, and for everyone who needed them to go out together. You know when you see T-shirts piled up in a clothes shop, beautifully folded and color-coded, and you buy one? It never looks the same when you take it home. It only looked good in the shop, and you realize too late, because it had its mates around it. Well, it was kind of like that."

"At seventeen, we were becoming as embittered and as unromantic as our parents."

"Everything happened so fast. I had kind of hoped that my adulthood would be long and meaty and instructive, but it all took place in those two years; sometimes it seems as though everything and everyone that have happened to me since were just minor distractions."

"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?"

"The unhappiest people I know, romantically speaking, are the ones who like pop music the most; and I don't know whether pop music has caused this unhappiness, but I do know that they've been listening to the sad songs longer than they've been living the unhappy lives."

"My genius, if I can call it that, is to combine a whole load of averageness into one compact frame."

"Only people of a certain disposition are frightened of being alone for the rest of their lives at twenty-six; we were of that disposition."

"I'm glad I learned to stay home and sulk."

"You run the risk of losing anyone who is worth spending time with, unless you are so paranoid about loss that you choose someone unlosable, somebody who could not possibly appeal to anybody else at all. If you've going to go in for this stuff at all, you have to live with the possibility that it won't work out, that somebody called Marco, say, or in this case, Tom, is going to come along and upset you. But I didn't see it like that at the time. All I saw then was that I'd moved down a division and that it still hadn't worked out, and this seemed a cause for a great deal of misery and self-pity."

"'I can't deal with me, let alone you.'"

"Tuesday night I reorganize my record collection; I often do this at periods of emotional stress. There are some people who would find this a pretty dull way to spend an evening, but I'm not one of them. This is my life, and it's nice to be able to wade in it, immerse your arms in it, touch it."

"I always think that women are going to save me, lead me through to a better life, that they can change and redeem me."

"Fuck. I hate all this stuff. How old do you have to get before it stops?"

"I accept and understand that you can't be good at everything, and I am tragically unskilled in some very important areas. But sex is different; knowing that a successor is better in bed is impossible to take, and I don't know why."

"It's brilliant, being depressed; you can behave as badly as you like."

"I can see everything once it's already happened--I'm very good at the past. It's the present I can't understand."

"'Because I'd never stuck at anything before, and I'd made a promise to myself when we started seeing each other that I'd make it through at least one bad patch, just to see what happened. So I did.'"

"You know the worst thing about being rejected? The lack of control. If I could only control the when and how of being dumped by somebody, then it wouldn't seem as bad. But then, of course, it wouldn't be rejection, would it? It would be by mutual consent."

"...at some point or other along the way I remembered what it is I like about sex: what I like about sex is that I can lose myself in it entirely. Sex, in fact, is the most absorbing activity I have discovered in adulthood."

"Sex is about the only grown-up thing I know how to do; it's weird, then, that it's the only thing that can make me feel like a ten-year-old."

"Before we slept together, there was at least some pretense that it was something we both wanted to do, that it was the healthy, strong beginning of an exciting new relationship. Now all the pretense seems to have gone, and we're left to face the fact that we're sitting here because we don't know anybody else we could be sitting with."

"I feel as though I have been having conversations like this all my life. None of us is young anymore, but what has just taken place could have happened when I was sixteen, or twenty, or twenty-five. We got to adolescence and just stopped dead; we drew up the map then and left the boundaries exactly as they were."

"I want to be a well-rounded human being with none of these knotty lumps of rage and guilt and self-disgust."

"I've spent nearly thirty years listening to people singing about broken hearts, and has it helped me any? Has it fuck."

"It seems to me that if you place music (and books, probably, and films, and plays, and anything that makes you feel) at the center of your being, then you can't afford to sort out your love life, start to think of it as the finished product. You've got to pick at it, keep it alive and in turmoil, you've got to pick at it and unravel it until it all comes apart and you're compelled to start all over again. Maybe we all live life at too high a pitch, those of us who absorb emotional things all day, and as a 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."

"This is how she talks, as if nobody has ever had a conversation about this in the entire history of the world."

"You just have to smile and take it, otherwise it would drive you mad."

"When they've gone, I realize that I spent the whole time drinking instead of speaking, and as a consequence I can no longer focus properly."

"These aren't flesh wounds. These are life-threatening thrusts into the internal organs."

"'You're being deliberately obtuse.'"

"If people have to die, I don't want them dying near me. My mum and dad won't die near me, I've made bloody sure of that. When they go, I'll hardly feel a thing."

"'I can either stick up for myself sometimes or I can believe anything you say about me and end up hating myself every minute of the day.'"

"Every time I think I have got to the bottom, I find a new way to sink even lower, but I know that this is the worst, and that whatever happens to me from now on, however poor or stupid or single I get, these few minutes will remain with me as a shining cautionary beacon."

"What happened to me during the funeral was something like this: I saw, for the first time, how scared I am of dying, and of other people dying, and how this fear has prevented me from doing all sorts of things, like giving up smoking (because if you take death too seriously or not seriously enough, as I have been doing up till now, then what's the point?), and thinking about my life, especially my job, in a way that contains a concept of the future (too scary, because the future ends in death). But most of all it has prevented me from sticking with a relationship, because if you stick with a relationship, and your life becomes dependent on that person's life, and then they die, as they are bound to do, unless there are exceptional circumstances, e.g., they are a character from a science-fiction novel...well, you're up the creek without a paddle, aren't you?"

"'All I'm saying is that if you believe in a long-term monogamous relationship at all, then you have to allow for things happening to people, and you have to allow for things not happening to people. Otherwise, what's the use?"

"I've been thinking with my guts since I was fourteen years old, and frankly speaking, between you and me, I have come to the conclusion that my guts have shit for brains."

"'Just because it's a relationship, and it's based on soppy stuff, it doesn't mean you can't make intellectual decisions about it. Sometimes you just have to, otherwise you'll never get anywhere.'" Read more!

The Stranger

Basic plot descriptions led me to believe it that The Stranger by Albert Camus was mostly just a precursor to Burgess: a disaffected youth and his run-in with the legal system. However, the book itself had much more of Camus's philosophy packed into it than I expected in only 123 pages. A solid read; easily in my top-ten.


"I said, 'Yes,' just so I wouldn't have to say anything else."

"Having this presence breathing down my neck was starting to annoy me."

"He'd told me that they had to bury her quickly, because it gets hot in the plains, especially in this part of the country. That was when he told me he had lived in Paris and that he had found it hard to forget it. In Paris they kept vigil over the body for three, sometimes four days. But here you barely have time to get used to the idea before you have to start running after the hearse."
"I could feel the blood pounding in my temples."

"I had the whole sky in my eyes and it was blue and gold."

"Generally speaking, he's not very popular. But he often talks to me and sometimes stops by my place for a minute, because I listen to him. I find what he has to say interesting. Besides, I don't have any reason not to talk to him."

"'You don't realize that everybody's jealous of how good you have it with me. Someday you'll know just how good it was.'"

"I kissed her. We didn't say anything more from that point on. I held her to me and we hurried to catch a bus, get back, go to my place, and throw ourselves onto my bed."

"A minute later she asked me if I loved her. I told her it didn't mean anything but that I didn't think so."

"I said that people never change their lives, that in any case one life was as good as another and that I wasn't dissatisfied with mine here at all."

"When I was a student, I had lots of ambitions like that. But when I had to give up my studies I learned very quickly that none of it really mattered."

"...it was like knocking four quick times on the door of unhappiness."

"At one time or another all normal people have wished their loved ones were dead."

"He said it was impossible; all men believed in God, even those who turn their backs on him. That was his belief, and if he were ever to doubt it, his life would become meaningless."

"I think that at first I hadn't realized that all those people were crowding in to see me. Usually people didn't pay much attention to me. It took some doing on my part to understand that I was the cause of all the excitement."

"Everything was happening without my participation. My fate was being decided without anyone so much as asking my opinion."

"My mind was always on what was coming next, today or tomorrow."

"I was listening to my heartbeat. I couldn't imagine that this sound which had been with me for so long could ever stop. I've never really had much of an imagination. But still I would try to picture the exact moment when the beating of my heart would no longer be going on inside my head."

"Since we're all going to die, it's obvious that when and how don't matter."

"He wasn't even sure he was alive, because he was living like a dead man." Read more!

I Pass Like Night

Jonathan Ames teeters somewhere between clarity and overwhelming perversion, with a nod in there somewhere to minimalism. Alexander Vine, the protagonist of I Pass Like Night, is an omnivorous sex addict and an eager confidant of the friendly, lawless inhabitants of late-night Manhattan. In this relatively short novel, Ames gives us a jumbled history of Alexander's increasingly amoral life. Amid the stories of prostitution, alcoholism, and accidental homosexuality, Alexander emerges as a very human, albeit very confused, 20-something.

"And I thought to myself, the most sobering thing in the world is to look in the mirror and see how ugly you really are."

"He says that with all the whores on the street that he feels like he's in a candy store or toy department of women."

"During these last few weeks the clouds had been storing up poisons like an alcoholic's liver, and I didn't want to be caught underneath it now that it had been sliced open."

"For years I had been looking for a way to describe how I felt, and she had put it so perfectly, so simply: gutted like a fish."
"A queasy feeling came over me that has marked almost every erotic experience I've ever had."

"I walked towards Delancey and a bum was passed out, lying beside a building, and I saw that he had no arms and there was a can tied around his neck for money. I got to the corner and waited for the light to change and I thought to myself, men without hands can't really beg."

"That's how it began, but how it ended I don't really remember because there was no last time, like a first time, just a slow fade."

"But I'm clean now. All my diseases are gone and I'm a lot more careful these days. I still do have some small scars, but you can't see them at night, in the dark, in my bed."

"And sometimes I feel sorry for my penis, I make it do things it probably doesn't want to do, but it obliges anyways, and must think that everything is for a higher purpose."

"I said goodbye and left them chattering and complaining, like people everywhere that's what they do best."

"I thought of all the people I'd slept with in my life, all the bodies I'd touched, and how they would fill the whole room."

"But I knew she'd come back in a few days, it's a vicious cycle, and I wondered to myself, 'Why does she want me? Can't she see what I am?'"

"So I grew up in a state of constant preparation for disaster."

"The general rule for self preservation that was taught to me is this: Expect the worst and maybe it won't happen to you."

"Then other times she tells me about the pills she keeps in her top drawer 'just in case,' and how knowing the pills are there gives her a sense of security. She says things like that and I start feeling comfortable like I'm on common ground again because she's like all the other girls I've known, semi-suicidal."

"It was very quiet and I listened and my body was like a house and I could hear different doors slamming."

"I was sitting there and sort of hoping that somebody I knew would walk by, but it was almost three o'clock and I don't know many people."

"My head spun a little from the booze, but I was ready."

"All over my body, in my lower back, in my hands, in my stomach, along the shelf of my hips, in my arms, are bags and boxes of hates and angers, and that night in front of the boy's house is down there somewhere, making little cancers maybe, but it's closed tight for now. Thought that first night it leaked a little while I rode my bike and punished my legs on the hills and hated my town and hated all the ugly houses."

"I saw him less and less frequently, but we still went to an occasional movie or diner and I never told him once how I felt. It went on like that for a year and a half and I always thought it would change, that one day in the same way that it somehow had disappeared, it would come back and we'd be best friends again. So I hung on to whatever time he gave me and when you're wrapped up in it you think you're floating, but really I was just drowning more."

"I had loved him, but I didn't know how to love, and so he had always hated me and when he was ready he left me. And he was right to do it."

"...I know in my mind for the first time in my life--I've never believed that I would die. I've never even believed anybody else has died."

"I'm always looking for the person who replaces me, who thinks the things I do, who fills in for me when I'm not there. I know there is someone younger than me doing what I did and someone older doing what I will do, and someone my age being just like me."

"Then I felt something cold on my hip and I shivered with revulsion, because I'd fallen asleep and then woken up and remembered what we'd just done. I had been lost in the warm blankets and the sounds of the street outside, but then I heard her swallow and then felt the liquid and I knew we had these horrible bodies with holes and fluids and I was hating myself."
Read more!

The Mother's Recompense

This novel by Edith Wharton (The Age of Innocence, Ethan Frome) is concerned with the act of expatriation and how strange one can find their old country upon returning to it. This is especially true when the country is America at the turn of the 20th century. Oh, and I guess a vaguely-incestual love triangle would likewise complicate the homecoming. Of interest stylistically is the sparse use of psychonarration.

"Everything in her mind was hot and cold..."

"'It must,' she thought, 'be a little like the way the gravestones will behave on the Day of Judgment.'"

"Life still dated for her from that day--in spite of the way he had hurt her, of his having inflicted on her the bitterest pain she had ever suffered, he had yet given her more than he could take away."
"But gradually it came over her that to feel alone was not in the least what she wanted. She had never, for years at any rate, been able to bear it for long; the crowd, formerly a solace and an escape, had become a habit, and being face to face with her own thoughts was like facing a stranger."

"Yes: the war had brought them peace, strange and horrible as it was to think it."

"The overwhelming changes had all happened, in a whirl, during the years of her absence; and meanwhile she had been living in quiet backwaters, or in the steady European capitals where renewals make so little mark on the unyielding surface of the past."

"The war had swallowed her up, her and all her little concerns, as it had engulfed so many million others. It seemed written that, till the end, he should have to be thankful for the war."

"But the young people--what did they think? That would be the interesting thing to know. They had all, she gathered, far more interests and ideas than had scantily furnished her own youth, but all so broken up, scattered, and perpetually interrupted by the strenuous labour of their endless forms of sport, that they reminded her of a band of young entomologists, equipped with the newest thing in nets, but in far too great a hurry ever to catch anything. Yet perhaps it seemed so only to the slower motions of middle-age."

"'I hate talking. I only like noises that don't mean anything.'"

"The truth came to her, after that first evening, with the surprised discovery that the family had refrained from touching on her past not so much from prudery, or discretion even, as because such retrogressions were jolting uncomfortable affairs, and the line of least resistance flowed forward, not back."

"'I suppose I'm old-fashioned. Nothing shocks the young people nowadays--not even the Bible."

"It was evidently her pride to be perpetually invited, perpetually swamped in a multiplicity of boring engagements."

"'Life, for her, wherever she is, consists in going somewhere else in order to do exactly the same thing.'"

"They continued to stand facing each other, their inspiration spent, as if waiting for the accident that had swept them together to whirl them apart again."

"What did she know of any one of them? Nothing more, she now understood, than their glazed and impenetrable surfaces."

"'How can anybody love one day, and not the next?'"

"Her question seemed to drop into the silence like a shout; as if she had let fall a platter of brass on a marble floor."

"Who had suffered most the previous evening, he or she?"

"'The thing in the world I'm most afraid of is sterile pain,' he said after a moment. 'I should never want any one to be the cause of that.'"

"What a help it must be to turn to somebody who could tell one firmly, positively what to do--to be able to lay down one's moral torture like a heavy load at the end of the day!"

"She reflected with self-derision that all her suicidal impulses seemed to end in the same way; by landing her in the arms of some man she didn't care for."

"It was curious, in what neatly recurring patterns events often worked themselves out."

"Yes; it was true; she knew it herself: she had to go on cramming things into her days, things good, bad or indifferent, it hardly mattered which as long as they were crammed tight enough to leave no chinks for backward glances."

"'Never is a long word.'" Read more!

What Maisie Knew

What Maisie Knew is a coming-of-age story that details the character's cognitive development in interesting, experimental ways. It is Henry James' increasingly scandalous novel of divorce, infidelity, and the deterioration of the institution of family. Though in some ways on the cusp of Modernism, James is still very much stuck in the 19th century--his descriptions drag on, his diction is haughty and difficult. While certainly an elaborate, well-crafted novel, it is not exactly one that is initially readable.

"She was at the age for which all stories are true and all conceptions are stories."

"She was as droll as a charade or an animal towards the end of 'natural history' -a person whom people, to make talk lively, described to each other and imitated."

"She took refuge on the firm ground of fiction, through which indeed there curled the blue river of truth."

"Everything had something behind it: life was like a long, long corridor with rows of closed doors."

"There had been times when she had had to make the best of the impression that she was herself deceitful; yet she had never concealed anything bigger than a thought."

"'Fear, unfortunately, is a very big thing, and there's a great variety of kinds.'"

"'We do nothing in life but quarrel.'"

"'I've not killed anything,' he said; 'on the contrary I think I've produced life. I don't know what to call it - I haven't even known how decently to deal with it, to approach it; but, whatever it is, it's the most beautiful thing I've ever met - it's exquisite, it's sacred.'"

"'Have you been a hideous little hypocrite all these years that I've slaved to make you love me and deludedly believed you did?'" Read more!

The Great Gatsby

F. Scott Fitzgerald's classic novel about morality and materialism in 'The Jazz Age,' and everyone's favorite novel from 10th-grade English.

"Instead of being the warm center of the world, the Middle West now seemed like the ragged edge of the universe."

"And so with the sunshine and the great bursts of leaves growing on the trees, just as things grow in fast movies, I had that familiar conviction that life was beginning over again with the summer."

"Almost any exhibition of complete self-sufficiency draws a stunned tribute from me."

"I am not even faintly like a rose."
"Among the broken fragments of the last five minutes at the table I remember the candles being lit again, pointlessly, and I was conscious of wanting to look squarely at every one, and yet to avoid all eyes."

"'We heard it from three people, so it must be true.'"

"Her laughter, her gestures, her assertions became more violently affected moment by moment, and as she expanded the room grew smaller around her, until she seemed to be revolving on a noisy, creaking pivot through the smoky air."

"All I kept thinking about, over and over, was 'You can't live forever; you can't live forever.'"

"It was testimony to the romantic speculation he inspired that there were whispers about him from those who had found little that it was necessary to whisper about in this world."

"'I've been drunk for about a week, and I thought it might sober me up to sit in a library.'"

"'And I like large parties. They're so intimate. At small parties there isn't any privacy.'"

"At the enchanted metropolitan twilight I felt a haunting loneliness sometimes, and felt it in others--poor young clerks who loitered in front of windows waiting until it was time for a solitary restaurant dinner--young clerks in the dusk, wasting the most poignant moments of night and life."

"I wasn't actually in love, but I felt a sort of tender curiosity."

"Dishonesty in a woman is a thing you never blame deeply--I was casually sorry, and then I forgot."

"'It takes two to make an accident.'"

"Everyone suspects himself of at least one of the cardinal virtues, and this is mine: I am one of the few honest people that I have ever known."

"I had talked with him perhaps six times in the past month and found, to my disappointment, that he had little to say."

"'You see, I usually find myself among strangers because I drift here and there trying to forget the sad thing that happened to me.'"

"It's a great advantage not to drink among hard-drinking people. You can hold your tongue, and, moreover, you can time any little irregularity of your own so that everybody else is so blind that they don't see or care."

"Americans, while occasionally willing to be serfs, have always been obstinate about being peasantry."

"'I know I'm not very popular. I don't give big parties. I suppose you've got to make your house into a pigsty in order to have any friends--in the modern world.'"

"So we drove on toward death through the cooling twilight."

"She thought I knew a lot because I knew different things from her..."

"She was feeling the pressure of the world outside, and she wanted to see him and feel his presence beside her and be reassured that she was doing the right thing after all."

"Even when the East excited me most, even when I was most keenly aware of its superiority to the bored, sprawling, swollen towns beyond the Ohio, with their interminable inquisitions which spared only the children and the very old--even then it had always for me a quality of distortion."

"'I don't give a damn about you now, but it was a new experience for me, and I felt a little dizzy for a while.'"

"'I'm five years too old to lie to myself and call it honor.'" Read more!

Time's Arrow

Martin Amis, best known for his novel London Fields, is a master of postmodern absurdity. Time's Arrow exemplifies just how weird the written word can be: Amis' narrator is a second consciousness alive in the mind of a doctor whose life runs exactly in reverse. In fact, the entire world runs exactly in reverse. Romantic relationships begin with a huge fight. Patients leave the hospital with massive, life-threatening injuries. Conversations are flipped. People literally walk backwards. However, Time's Arrow is not just a lofty exercise in absurdism; it becomes an investigation of the politics and eugenics employed by Nazi Germany. Of interest is the intertextual relationship Amis creates with the prevalent themes in Vonnegut's Slaughterhouse-Five.

The good life, at least, is better than the bad life."

"Something isn't quite working: this body I'm in won't take orders from this will of mine. Look around, I say. But his neck ignores me. His eyes have their own agenda. Is it serious? Are we okay? I didn't panic."

"I don't quite recognize this world we're in. Everything is familiar but not at all reassuring. Far from it."
"The mad are said to keep a film or stage set in their heads, which they order and art-decorate and move through."

"I drag myself out of bed each night to start the day..."

"We sit in lines and worship a corpse."

"It's all strange to me. I know I live on a fierce and magical planet, which sheds or surrenders rain or even flings it off in whipstroke after whipstroke, which fires out bolts of electric gold into firmament at 186,000 miles per second, which with a single shrug of its tectonic plates can erect a city in half an hour. Creation...is easy, is quick."

"The moon I actually like looking at. Its face, at this time of the month, is especially craven and chinless, like the earth's exiled or demoted soul."

"Destruction--is difficult. Destruction is slow."

"The buildings around here are right down on their knees. That's evidently the thing with the contemporary city. You might want to work in it. But no one is seriously expected to live in it. Content, meaning and content, are all stored uptown, in the notched pillars of the skyscrapers."

"Personally, I think we can dismiss suicide as a hollow threat. I've been thinking about it. Suicide isn't an option, is it. Not in this world. Once you're here, once you're on board, you can't get off. You can't get out."

"I know how people disappear. Where do they disappear to? Don't ask that question. Never ask it. It's none of your business."

"It seems to me that you need a lot of courage, or a lot of something, to enter into others, into other people. We all think that everyone else lives in fortresses, in fastnesses: behind moats, behind sheer walls studded with spikes and broken glass. But in fact we inhabit much punier structures. We are, it turns out, all jerry-built. Or not even. You can just stick your head under the flap of the tent and crawl right in. If you get the okay."

"Probably human cruelty is fixed and eternal. Only styles can change."

"Why aren't people happier about how great they're feeling, relatively? Why don't we hug each other all the time, saying, 'How about this?'"

"The voice of conscience. It speaks in a whisper. Nobody hears it."

"I have noticed in the past, of course, that most conversations would make much better sense if you ran them backward. But with this man-woman stuff, you could run them any way you liked--and still get no further forward."

"Her body is probably naked by now but there is nothing as naked as human eyes: they haven't even got skin over them."

"One man, one woman: I think we owe this to the human body."

"Time, the human dimension, which makes us everything we are."

"The premise for alcohol abuse, one gathers, is that consciousness, or selfhood, or corporeality, is intolerable. But it is intolerable. Certainly when you're chockful of gangrene. Here is comes again, consciousness, weary, multiform, intolerable."

"Consciousness isn't intolerable. It is beautiful: the eternal creation and dissolution of mental forms."

"At such times, I conclude, the soul can only hang in the dark, like a white bat, and let darkness have the day. Beneath, the body does what it does, in mechanical exertions of will and sinew, while the soul waits."

"The fact that a woman's body has a head on top of it isn't much more than a detail."

"They are reconciling themselves to their own mortality. They are doing what we all have to do down here on earth: they are getting ready to die."

"I'm being immature. I've got to get over it. I keep expecting the world to make sense. It doesn't. It won't. Ever."

"Maybe you're doomed in the heart, as they say, and you're never over your first love."

"Everyone smokes and drinks and messes around. No one works out."

"They were in bed together at the time, staring sadly at the ceiling. Then one thing led to another."

"For to me the stars are motelike, just twists of dust. Yet I feel their fire. How they burn my sight."

"I'm tired of being human."

"Now and then, when the night sky is starless, I look up and form the hilarious suspicion that the world will soon start making sense."

"There is a growing coldness in the household. Emotion is retreating from it. This is how things should be."

"I might be impressed and affected by this sudden talent for suffering, if it weren't for its monotony: fear, just fear, fear only."

"Hier ist kein warum. Here there is no why. Here there is no when, no how, no where."

"The dead look so dead. Dead bodies have their dead body language. It says nothing."

"Well, we cry and twist and are naked at both ends of life. We cry at both ends of life, while the doctor watches."

"The truth was the last thing I was ready for."

"Human beings want to be alive. They are dying to be alive."

"The future always comes true." Read more!

Slaughterhouse-Five; or The Children's Crusade: A Duty-Dance With Death

Kurt Vonnegut's classic novel presents the fire-bombing of Dresden in World War Two and its effects on Billy Pilgrim, the possibly-insane time-travelling protagonist. Slaughterhouse-Five takes a more serious tone than Vonnegut's other novels, dealing with the ethics of warfare as well as alternative concepts of time and their implications regarding fate and mortality.

"I have this disease late at night sometimes, involving alcohol and the telephone."

"And I asked myself about the present: how wide it was, how deep it was, how much was mine to keep."

"People aren't supposed to look back. I'm certainly not going to do it anymore."

"'The most important thing I learned on Tralfamadore was that when a person dies he only appears to die. He is still very much alive in the past, so it is very silly for people to cry at his funeral. All moments, past, present, and future, always have existed, always will exist."

"The congregation had been theoretically spotted from the air by a theoretical enemy. They were all theoretically dead now. The theoretical corpses laughed and ate a hearty noontime meal."

"Among the things Billy Pilgrim could not change were the past, the present, and the future."

"They had teeth like piano keys."

"There was a tiny plume of smoke at infinity. There was a battle there. People were dying there. So it goes."

"'All time is all time. It does not change. It does not lend itself to warnings or explanations. It simply is. Take it moment by moment, and you will find that we are all, as I've said before, bugs in amber.'"

"So they were there trying to re-invent themselves and their universe. Science fiction was a big help."

"'How nice--to feel nothing, and still get full credit for being alive.'"

"'That's one thing Earthlings might learn to do, if they tried hard enough: Ignore the awful times, and concentrate on the good ones.'"

"It was very exciting for her, taking his dignity away in the name of love."

"There are almost no characters in this story, and almost no dramatic confrontations, because most of the people in it are so sick and so much the listless playthings of enormous forces. One of the main effects of war, after all, is that people are discouraged from being characters."

"'All these years,' he said, 'I've been opening the window and making love to the world.'"

"She was a dull person, but a sensational invitation to make babies. Men looked at her and wanted to fill her up with babies right away. She hadn't had even one baby yet. She used birth control."

"'I put everything that happens to me in books.'"

"Nobody talked much as the expedition crossed the moon. There was nothing appropriate to say. One thing was clear: Absolutely everybody in the city was supposed to be dead, regardless of what they were, and that anybody that moved in it represented a flaw in the design. There were to be no moon men at all."

"'Oh God--' he said, 'I knew it was going to be bad getting old.' He shook his head. 'I didn't know it was going to be this bad.'" Read more!

Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas:A Savage Journey to the Heart of the American Dream

Hunter S. Thompson/Raoul Duke's "fictional" account of a journalistic assignment gone terribly wrong, by most standards. Among the accounts of various drug experiences and hallucinations, the narrator and his "attorney" try to find the tangible manifestation of the American Dream. The result is a commentary on the declining counterculture of the '60s, the Nixon administration, the Vietnam War, and the culture-at-large. Against the definitively postmodern landscape of the Vegas Strip, Thompson's twisted version of the novelistic hero experiences a paranoid disconnect with American reality, one which may not have needed the aid of psychedelics.

"Avoid those quick bursts of acceleration that drag blood to the back of the brain."

"My blood is too thick for California: I have never been able to properly explain myself in this climate."

"Never lose sight of the primary responsibility."

"Every now and then when your life gets complicated and the weasels start closing in, the only real cure is to load up on heinous chemicals and then drive like a bastard from Hollywood to Las Vegas."
"Old elephants limp off to the hills to die; old Americans go out to the highway and drive themselves to death with huge cars."

"Terrible things were happening all around us."

"...you can actually watch yourself behaving in this terrible way, but you can't control it."

"The mind recoils in horror, unable to communicate with the spinal column."

"No, this is not a good town for psychedelic drugs. Reality itself is too twisted."

"One of the things you learn, after years of dealing with drug people, is that everything is serious. You can turn your back on a person, but never turn your back on a drug..."

"The room was very quiet. I walked over to the TV set and turned it on to a dead channel--white noise at maximum decibels, a fine sound for sleeping, a powerful continuous hiss to drown out everything strange."

"I live in a quiet place, where any sound at night means something is about to happen: You come awake fast--thinking, what does that mean?"

"History is hard to know, because of all the hired bullshit, but even without being sure of "history" it seems entirely reasonable to think that every now and then the energy of a whole generation comes to a head in a long fine flash, for reasons that nobody really understands at the time — and which never explain, in retrospect, what actually happened."

"In a closed society where everybody's a guilty, the only crime is getting caught. In a world of thieves, the only final sin is stupidity."

"Reading the front page made me feel a lot better. Against that heinous background, my crimes were pale and meaningless."

"The line between madness and masochism was already hazy; the time had come to pull back...to retire, hunker down, back off and "cop out," as it were. Why not? In every gig like this, there comes a time to either cut your losses or consolidate your winnings--whichever fits."

"This culture has beaten me down."

"How many more nights and weird morning can this terrible shit go on? How long can the body and the brain tolerate this doom-struck craziness? This grinding of teeth, this pouring of sweat, this pounding of blood in the temples...small blue veins gone amok in front of the ears, sixty and seventy hours with no sleep..."

"Is there a priest in this tavern? I want to confess! I'm a fucking sinner! Venal, mortal, carnal, major, minor--however you want to call it, Lord...I'm guilty."

"The sun was hot and I felt like killing something. Anything."

"You better watch yourself, I thought. There are limits to what the human body can endure. You don't want to break down and start bleeding from the ears right here in the terminal."

"I felt like Othello. Here I'd only been in town a few hours, and we'd already laid the groundwork for a classic tragedy. The hero was doomed; he had already sown the seed of his own downfall..."

"Death. I was sure of it. Not even my lungs seemed to be functioning. I needed artificial respiration, but I couldn't open my mouth to say so. I was going to die. Just sitting there on the bed, unable to move...well at least there's no pain. Probably, I'll black out in a few seconds, and after that it won't matter."

"We're looking for the American Dream, and we were told it was somewhere in this area..."

"Uppers are going out of style."

"The press is a gang of cruel faggots. Journalism is not a profession or a trade. It is a cheap catch-all for fuckoffs and misfits--a false doorway to the backside of life, a filtyh piss-ridden little hole nailed off by the building inspector, but just deep enough for a wino to curl up from the sidewalk and masturbate like a chimp in a zoo-cage."

"The big market, these days, is in Downers. Reds and smack--Seconal and heroin--and a hellbroth of bad domestic grass sprayed with everything from arsenic to horse tranquilizers. What sells, today, is whatever Fucks You Up--whatever short-circuits your brain and grounds it out for the longest possible time."

"I was so far beyond simple fatigue that I was beginning to feel nicely adjusted to the idea of permanent hysteria." Read more!

The Cheese Monkeys

Graphic designer Chip Kidd's hilarious, art school based "novel in two semesters" isn't necessarily a literary masterpiece, but it's a page-turner. The satire is thick, no aspect of college-life (art kids, parents, crazy professors, etc.) is left unscathed.

"College? I was never too crazy about the idea in the first place, but not going didn't seem to be a choice--any more than going through puberty. And it looked to be about a tenth as fun. Actually, it wasn't hatred of Art that led me to State at all, it was hatred of responsibility. In the face of this distant but charging train of education, I just ran along the tracks and alit onto the platform at the nearest station."

"I kept pretending to read and bobbed my head, eager to avoid a conversation. If we started talking now, we'd have to think up things to say for what looked to be hours."

"Small talk is small in every way except when you try to get around it. Then it's enormous."

"I just didn't do things like that. I was too young."

"Several shadowy patrons in plaid flannel and worn denim lurked along the edges of the bar. They ignored us and went about the business of forgetting yesterday, today, and tomorrow."

"I promised God I'd never drink again if He'd just let me stop heaving, but He didn't get my call until late the next morning."

"She needed a worthy foe, always--someone to ricochet off of in order to keep up the momentum. And I would never, could never, be that."

"We are the Western world. We read, see, think. Left. To. Right. We can't help it."

"'Always remember: Limits are possibilities. That sounds like Orwell, I know. It's not--it's Patton. Formal restrictions, contrary to what you might think, free you up by allowing you to concentrate on purer ideas."

"No doubt--she was fatally sorry she'd spoken up. Sorry that God had ever put a tongue in her mouth."

"The first day, the hard realities are just the theory--the deadline is still abstract and you're not in a rush. You laugh, you're at ease, you work slowly--as if extra time can be delivered at some point, like a pizza. You stay calm. And later you will regret it, deeply."

"After ninety-six hours, it's not a pencil anymore, it's a yellow pointypointy that makes marks for you when you give it brain signals and frankly it's bored and wants a life of its own. Can you blame it? Of course you can. Someone made it. How did they get the hard blackyblack in there? Was it Space Beings? The pointypointy drops yellow to the floor. The floor is fifty feet down. You'll drown if you go after it. No more pointypointy."

"As your project nears completion, it is becoming more coherent and realized, while you are deteriorating." Read more!

The Bluest Eye

Toni Morrison won the Nobel Prize for this novel. Set in rural Ohio during the mid-1900's, a young and apparently unnattractive African-American girl is presented with the difficulties of growing up surrounded by white hegemony, domestic violence, and rape.

"There is really nothing more to say--except why. But since why is difficult to handle, one must take refuse in how."

"Adults do not talk to us--they give us directions. They issue orders without providing information."

"The smoke from their cigarettes they inhaled deeply, forcing it to fill their lungs, their hearts, their thighs, and keep at bay the shiveriness, the energy of their youth. They moved slowly, laughed slowly, but flicked the ashes from their cigarettes too quickly too often, and exposed themselves, to those who were interested, as novices to the habit."

"Anger is better. There is a sense of being in anger. A reality and presence. An awareness of worth. It is a lovely surging."

"There in the dark her memory was refreshed, and she succumbed to her earlier dreams. Along with the idea of romantic love, she was introduced to another--physical beauty. Probably the most destructive ideas in the history of human thought. Bother originated in envy, thrived in insecurity, and ended in disillusion."

"Love is never any better than the lover." Read more!

Perfect From Now On

Perfect From Now On: How Indie Rock Saved My Life is a ridiculously misleading title that John Sellers borrowed from the 1997 Built To Spill album (which is of considerable higher quality than this book). I had hoped for possilby some in-depth discussion regarding how discovering Pavement and Sonic Youth et al. changed his perspective on life or had some sort of profound influence on his outlook. No. Instead, Sellers treats readers to an inconsistent history of the bands that he has been "obsessed" with since adolescence, eventually dissolving into five chapters discussing, in excruciating detail, how drunk he got with Bob Pollard (Guided By Voices). The book reads like it is, quite accurately, a blogger's attempt at penning something over 500 words: his footnotes drag on and take up half of the page at times, his wit is too forced for comfort. For anyone interested in GBV, I recommend a read. For anyone else, you're going to feel out of place--Sellers is quick to dismiss crucial bands (of the Fall, he says: "Sounds like bad Pavement, sorry").
Ultimately, Sellers knows what he's talking about. He just needs a better editor and some sort of legitimate narrative arc. But, hell, I've got an autographed copy.
"Any self-respecting music fan in 2007 should own an iPod, or another portable digital music player, because these devices represent a cultural shift in the way we listen to music."

"Now there are a few ways you can give in to musical obsession. You can give in suddenly and briefly--such as when, over the course of a few weeks or months, you find yourself hooked on a particular album (especially a debut album or a breakout album) and start talking up the artist to everyone you know; but then, after seeing a boring live performance or hearing someone you don't respect gush about the music, you just as suddenly denounce the artist as being annoying or unoriginal."

"Our differences in listening to music was a major reason I'd retreated from them, my best friends in the world. I wanted to hang out, hold court, and blare music, and they did not. I wanted to go to concerts, get drunk, and let go; they wanted to get up early. It was a drag."

"...there was a television channel that blended two of your favorite pastimes: watching television and listening to music. Now you could literally watch music!"

"In fact--I know this is shallow--I snubbed them party because of the hype. Due to the exhaustion for hype, I no longer felt compelled to listen to the things a person my age was being told to listen to."

"The lyrics of those favored bands were often impossible to decipher, and it fit a phase I was in. Lyrics had been getting in the way because they further cluttered up my head. I required complex, pretty, inscrutable songs turned up very loud to help me avoid thinking that I didn't like myself very much."

"I am forever stuck in a loop of missed opportunity."

"A drinking party is different from a regular party. At normal parties, most attendees follow the strange customs of dancing to bad music, bantering with people they don't like, and flirting without discretion; drinking is secondary. At a drinking party, the idea is simply to hang with your buddies and get drunk."

"By and large they are peopled by hiply dressed twentysomethings standing almost entirely still but for the bobbing of their heads; occasionally some of them might be moved enough to smack their hands against their legs in time to the music."

"The euphoric end of the extremes is what matters: It is simply wrong to love music halfway." Read more!

Chuck Klosterman IV:A Decade of Curious People and Dangerous Ideas

IV is a compilation of Klosterman's previously published articles and columns (taken from Spin, Esquire, etc) plus a bit of fiction tagged onto the end. The only things "new" in the book are the introductions, footnotes, and hypothetical questions.
I realize the guy is pretty polarizing, but you've got to admit he's quotable. That said, this entry is gigantic. Sorry!

"Self-consciousness is never sexy."

"...arrogance doesn't matter if you're right."

"If something is good today, it will be good tomorrow. Variety is overrated; variety is for philanderers."

"American culture is nothing more than a pastiche of fixations. We are obsessed with health. We are obsessed with pleasure. We are obsessed with speed. We are obsessed with efficiency. In simplest terms, we are obsessed by the desire to accelerate every element of our existence in a futile attempt to experience as much life as we can in the shortest possible time. We have all entered a race to devour the largest volume of gratification before it kills us."
"Nobody over the age of six actively aspires to go to McDonald's but--eventually--everyone does."

"words and their meanings have been swallowed by the deep-fat fryer of social depravity."

"Staying alive is complicated. It's the single most difficult thing every single person does every single day. There is just so much in this wicked world that can kill us: cancer, avalanches, liver failure, street gangs wearing baseball uniforms, gravity, electric chairs, death squads, hammerhead sharks, werewolves, hemlock, and a boundless cornucopia of other coldhearted entities who solely exist so that we may not. Everything is bad for you."

"My organs are indestructible."

"In rock, 'progressive' doesn't mean writing about the future; it means writing about a past that never happened."

"...sometimes the difference between self-actualization and self-amusement is less than you think."

"Q: How do you make fifty goth kids sprint across Disneyland?
A: Put up a sign that says 'Smoking Section.'"

"There have been countless occasions when I've listened to a song and imagined what its words and sounds were supposed to represent, and I inevitably perceive each element to be complex and subtle and conscious. However, when the songwriter eventually explains his thought process during the music's creation, I often realize that (a) the musician barely cares what the song is supposed to mean, and that (b) I've actually invested more intellectual energy into the song than the goddamn artist."

"Sometimes you can't find the meaning behind a metaphor because there is no metaphor."

"This wasn't even like shooting fish in a barrel; this was like shooting fish in a barrel of Vaseline."

"If you're willing to pay for fake conversation, no one's going to stop you."

"Whats weirder: admitting that you're crazy, or always pretending that you are not?"

"I write about dead people. A lot. However, I always seem to end up writing about how certain individuals' deaths inadvertently reflect some abstract trend in society they never consciously embodied."

"...it really doesn't matter what you do artistically, nor does it matter how many people like what you create; what matters is who likes what you do artistically and what liking that art is supposed to say about who you are."

"The things that matter to normal people are not supposed to matter to smart people."

"Choice makes us depressed.
We just don't realize it."

"There will never again be 'cultural knowledge' that everybody knows, mostly because there is simply too much culture to know about."

"In the present tense, we always want the maximum number of alternatives; in the short term, choice improves our lives, and we're completely aware of that. The problematic rub is that--over time--choice isolates us. We have fewer shared experiences, and that makes us feel alone. The proliferation of choice makes us feel vaguely alienated, and that makes us depressed. But this relationship is not something we're conscious of, because it seems crazy to attribute loneliness to freedom. We just think we're inexplicably less happy than we should be."


"Americans tend to be conspiracy theorists, but they're not particularly skeptical."

"Every woman I've ever known has at least one close friend whose only purpose in life is to criticize their actions, compete for men's attention, and drive them insane; very often, this is a woman's best friend."

"Women intrinsically understand human dynamics, and that makes them unstoppable."

"Prepare to have your paradigm shifted..."

"As I grow older, I find myself less prone to have an opinion about anything, and to distrust just about everyone who does. Whenever I meet someone who openly identifies themselves as a Republican or a Democrat, my immediate thought is always, Well, this person might be interesting, but they'll never say anything about politics that's remotely useful to me. I refuse to discuss abortion with anyone who is pro-life or pro-choice; I refuse to discuss affirmative action with any unemployed white guy or any unemployed black guy. All the world's stupidest people are either zealots or atheists. If you want to truly deduce how intelligent someone is, just as this person how they feel about any issue that doesn't have an answer; the more certainty they express, the less sense they have. This is because certainty only comes from dogma."

"Life is fucking confusing. I don't know anything, and neither do you."

"It never matters what you like; what matters is why you like it."

"There's always this peculiar disconnect between how people exist in the world and how they think the world is supposed to exist; it's almost as if Americans can't accept an important truth about being alive. And this is the truth to which I refer: culture can't be wrong. That doesn't mean it's always 'right,' nor does it mean you always have to agree with it. But culture is never wrong. People can be wrong, and movements can be wrong. But culture--as a whole--cannot be wrong. Culture is just there."

"When people cheat, it has almost nothing to do with who they're with or who they potentially want; it just has to do with whether they view their fidelity as a realistic way to exist."

"I wasn't seducing them in any real context. I was simply eroding their morality."

"...if this were 1904, you would not be reading this essay; you would be chopping wood or churning butter or watching one of your thirteen children perish from crib death. Your life would be horrible, but your life would have purpose. It would have clarity. Machines allow humans the privilege of existential anxiety. Machines provide us with the extra time to worry about the status of our careers, and/or the context of our sexual relationships, and/or what it means to be alive. Unconsciously, we hate technology. We hate the way it replaces visceral experience with self-absorption."

"Modernity has created a cosmic difference between intellect and action, even when both are driven by the same motives..."

"Security has a way of making philosophy irrelevant, and anyone who disagrees is either a liar or a tenured professor."

"This idea seems unspeakably brilliant to me, and I honestly can't believe I'm the only person who ever got high and came up with it."

"If I were an adult, I would be drinking coffee; as it is, I'm drinking Mountain Dew"

"There are many things that PCP does to your brain, but it mainly serves to convince you that you're not high enough."

"Like all geniuses, I don't work before noon."

"It's kind of like drunk driving: every time I suspect I'm too drunk to operate my car and I ask someone else for a ride. it really means I can probably make it home on my own; whenever I'm sober enough to worry about dying or going to jail, I'm obviously not very drunk. However, whenever I'm too fucked up to do anything (drive, light a cigarette, masturbate, etc.), I inevitably crawl behind the wheel of my car and drive home alone, sometimes (ahem) 'erratically.' This is why I still can't understand how Alcoholics Anonymous is supposed to work. If the first step to recovery is 'realizing there's a problem' . . . well, if you realize it, it can't be much of a problem, can it?"

"I figure I have fifty minutes to get fucked up, plus or minus three hundred seconds. Time for three drinks, maybe. The first glass goes down like a handful of liquid thistles, but the second is smooth as a gravy avalanche and the third literally disappears from the glass that contains it."

"I suppose that's poetic, but it's certainly not getting me any drunker."

"People love metaphors, and so do I. If given the opportunity, I will try to compare anything to something else, even if they're only marginally related." Read more!

The Human Stain

Philip Roth's The Human Stain took me a while, and it was a step outside my usual literary interests, hence the lower post frequency. Because of this, I don't feel it's appropriate for me to give a review of the book either way. To be fair: Roth is a good writer, the book had some metafictional moments, and the novel overall is an alright commentary on late 20th-century American moralism.

"There is something fascinating about what moral suffering can do to someone who is in no obvious way a weak or feeble person. It's more insidious even than what physical illness can do, because there is no morphine drip or spinal block or radical surgery to alleviate it. Once you're in its grip, it's as though it will have to kill you for you to be free of it. Its raw realism like nothing else."

"'She's turned sex into a vice again.'"

"'I know that every mistake that a man can make usually has a sexual accelerator.'"

"The secret to living in the rush of the world with a minimum of pain is to get as many people as possible to string along with your delusions; the trick to living alone up here, away from all agitating entanglements, allurements, and expectations, apart especially from one's own intensity, is to organize the silence, to think of its mountaintop plentitude as capital, silence as wealth exponentially increasing. The encircling silence as your chosen source of advantage and your only intimate.""I did not more than find a friend, and all the world's malice came rushing in."

"Often they said nothing, because saying nothing intensified their pleasure."

"Nothing lasts, and yet nothing passes, either. And nothing passes just because nothing lasts."

"He did love secrets. The secret of nobody's knowing what was going on in your head, thinking whatever your wanted to think with no way of anybody's knowing. All the other kids were always blabbing about themselves. But that wasn't where the power was or the pleasure either. The power and pleasure were to be found in the opposite, in being counterconfessional."

"Singularity. The passionate struggle for singularity. The singular animal. The sliding relationship with everything. Not static but sliding. Self-knowledge but concealed. What is as powerful as that?"

"It occurred first to his heart, which began banging away like the heart of someone on the bring of committing his first great crime."

"They were together in the bed in his room every weekend for over a year, feeding on each other like prisoners in solitary madly downing their daily ration of bread and water."

"What he'd learned in the navy is that all you have to do is give a pretty good and consistent line abut yourself and nobody ever inquires, because no one's that interested."

"Closure! They fix on the conventionalized narrative, with its beginning, middle, and end--every experience, no matter how ambiguous, no matter how knotty or mysterious, must lend itself to this normalizing, conventionalizing, anchorman cliche."

"Why does someone so beautiful want to hide from the human dimension of her experience behind these words?"

"He'd said to her, 'This is more than sex,' and flatly she replied, 'No, it's not. You just forgot what sex is. This is sex. All by itself. Don't fuck it up by pretending it's something else.'"

"All that we don't know is astonishing. Even more astonishing is what passes for knowing."

"How many times has anyone in the world ever loved before they fucked? How many times have I loved after I fucked?"

"I stayed. I stupidly stayed. Leaving at night--there is nothing more important for a girl like me. I'm not clear about a lot of things, but this I know: staying the next morning, it means something."

"What the hookers told her, the whores' great wisdom: 'Men don't pay you to sleep with them. They pay you to go home.'"

"Death intervenes to simplify everything. Every doubt, every misgiving, every uncertainty is swept aside by the greatest belittler of them all, which is death."

"There is truth and then again there is truth. For all that the world is full of people who go around believing they've got you or your neighbor figured out, there really is no bottom to what is not known. The truth about us is endless. As are the lies."

"..the danger with hatred is, once you start in on it, you get a hundred times more than you bargained for. Once you start, you can't stop. I don't know anything harder to control than hating. Easier to kick drinking than to master hate. And that is saying something."

"As it is a human thing to have a secret, it is also a human thing, sooner or later, to reveal it."

"You'd written the book--the book was your life. Writing personally is exposing and concealing at the same time, but with you it could only be concealment and so it would never work. Your book was your life--and your art." Read more!

If on a winter's night a traveler

Italo Calvino is amazing. This was my second read of If on a winter's night a traveler, and I caught more wit (arrogance?) and wordplay than before. I'm not sure how to even go about describing the plot except to say that it's a book about books. It is metafiction at its most obnoxious (arrogant?), and it's done flawlessly. Really, anyone vaguely interested in literature should read this book at least once. Not only is it a good example of good literature, but it comments on the very concept of literature. On the pressing of the novel I own, there is a quote from The New York Review of Books that says: "Calvino is a wizard," and I couldn't agree more.


"Of course, the ideal position for reading is something you can never find."

"Try to foresee everything that might make you interrupt your reading. Cigarettes within reach, if you smoke, and the ashtray. Anything else?"

"It's not that you expect anything particular from this particular book. You're the sort of person who, on principle, no longer expects anything of anything. There are plenty, younger than you or less young, who live in expectation of extraordinary experiences: from books, from people, from journeys, from events, from what tomorrow has in store. But not you. You know that the best you can expect is to avoid the worst."
"Long novels written today are perhaps a contradiction: the dimension of time has been shattered, we cannot love or think except in fragments of time each of which goes off along its own trajectory and immediately disappears."

"I leave traces if I do not speak with anyone, since I stick out as a man who won't open his mouth; I leave traces if I speak with someone because everyone word spoken is a word that remains and can crop up again later, with quotation marks or without."

"I am not the sort of person who attracts attention. I am an anonymous background presence against an even more anonymous background."

"This is what I mean when I say I would like to swim against the stream of time: I would like to erase the consequences of certain events and restore an initial condition."

"...these are people used to seeing one another daily year after year; everything they say is the continuation of things already said."

"You spend a restless night, your sleep is intermittent, jammed flow, like the reading of the novel, with dreams that seem to you the repetition of one dream always the same."

"I've become so accustomed to not reading that I don't even read what appears before my eyes. It's not easy: they teach us to read as children, and for the rest of our lives we remain the slaves of all the written stuff they fling in front of us. I may have had to make some effort myself, at first, to learn not to read, but now it comes quite naturally to me. The secret is not refusing to look at the written words. On the contrary, you must look at them, intensely, until they disappear."

"They want problems to debate, general ideas to connect with other general ideas."

"This is a dead department of a dead literature in a dead language."

"I go past the meteorological observatory, and I think of the end of the world which is approaching, or, rather, which has been in progress for a long while."

"There are days when everything I see seems to me charged with meaning: messages it would be difficult for me to communicate to others, define, translate into words, but which for this very reason appear to me decisive."

"I am telling the first impressions I noted, which are the ones that count."

"...I find in the day's light, in this diffused, pale, almost shadowless luminosity, a darkness deeper than the night's."

"In any case, the person who finds this diary will have one certain advantage over me: with a written language it is always possible to reconstruct a dictionary and grammar, isolate sentences, transcribe them or paraphrase them in another language, whereas I am trying to read in the succession of things presented to me every day the world's intentions toward me, and I grope my way, knowing there there can exist no dictionary that will translate into words the burden of the obscure allusions that lurks in these things."

"The doctors have given me permission to consume alcoholic beverages in moderation."

"I took this dialogue as a warning to be on guard: the world is falling apart and tries to lure me into its disintegration."

"I sensed at once that in the perfect order of the universe a breach had opened, an irreparable rent."

"'All books continue in the beyond.'"

"The truth is that we were all very young, too young for everything we were experiencing..."

"In a distress that lasts an instant, I seem to be feeling what she feels: that every void continues in the void, every gap, even a short one, opens onto another gap, every chasm empties into the infinite abyss."

"'I didn't mean to discuss; I wanted to read.'"

"Because in this way all I did was to accumulate past after past behind me, multiplying the pasts, and if one life was too dense and ramified and embroiled for me to bear it always with me, imagine so many lives, each with its own past and the pasts of the other lives that continue to become entangled one with the others."

"Anyway, the conclusion to which all stories come is that the life a person has led is one and one alone, uniform and compact as a shrunken blanket where you can't distinguish the fibers of the weave."

"Everything happened in the quickest and cleanest way, giving him no time to turn and recognize me, to know who had arrived to spoil his party, maybe not even to become aware of crossing the broder between the hell of the living and the hell of the dead."

"It was better like that, for me to look him in the face only as a dead man."

"I'm producing too many stories at once because what I want is for you to feel, around the story, a saturation of other stories that I could tell and maybe will tell or who knows may already have told on some other occasion, a space full of stories that perhaps is simply my lifetime, where you can move in all directions, as in space, always finding stories that cannot be told until other stories are told first, and so, setting out from any momoent or place, you encounter always the same density of material to be told."

"I sit down at the desk, but no story I invent corresponds to what I would like to convey."

"There is a telephone chasing me, there is somebody looking up all the numbers on Chestnut Lane in the directory, and he is calling one house after the other to see if he can overtake me."

"We live in a uniform civilization, within well-defined cultural models: furnishings, decorative elements, blankets, record player have been chosen among a certain number of given possibilities. What can they reveal to you about what she is really like?"

"Your house, being the place in which you read, can tell us the position books occupy in your life, if they are a defense you set up to keep the outside world at a distance, if they are a dream into which you sink as if into a drug, or bridges you cast toward the outside, toward the world that interests you so much that you want to multiply and extend its dimensions through books."

"It could be an important feature to be added to your portrait: your mind has interior walls that allow you to partition different times in which to stop or flow, to concentrate alternately on parallel channels. Is this enough to say you would like to live several lives simultaneously? Or that you actually do live them? That you separate your life with others, elsewhere? That in every experience you take for granted a dissatisfaction that can be redeemed only in the sum of all dissatisfactions?"

"Would you like to penetrate her shell, insinuating yourself among the pages of the books she is reading?"

"The lives of individuals of the human race form a constant plot, in which every attempt to isolate one piece of living that has a meaning separate from the rest--for example, the meeting of two people, which will become decisive for both--must bear in mind that each of the two brings with himself a texture of events, environments, other people, and that from the meeting, in turn, other stories will be derived which will break off from their common story."

"In short, what you are doing is very beautiful but grammatically it doesn't change a thing. At the moment when you most appear to be a united voi, a second person plural, you are two tu's, more separate and circumscribed than before."

"It is not the body that is, in you, the object of reading: the body matters insofar as it is part of a complex of elaborate elements, not all visible and not all present, but manifested in visible and present events: the clouding of your eyes, your laughing, the words you speak, your way of gathering and spreading your hair, your initiatives and your reticences, and all the signs that are on the frontier between you and usage and habits and memory and prehistory and fashion, all codes, all the poor alphabets by which one human being believes at certain moments that he is reading another human being."

"...she is not reading you, single and whole as you are, but using you, using fragments of you detached from the context to construct for herself a ghostly partner, known to her alone, in the penumbra of her semiconsciousness, and what she is deciphering is this apocryphal visitor, not you."

"Lover's reading of each other's bodies (of that concentrate of mind and body which lovers use to go to bed together) differs from the reading of written pages in that it is not linear. It starts at any point, skips, repeats itself, goes backward, insists, ramifies in simultaneous and divergent messages, converges again, has moments of irritation, turns the page, finds its place, gets lost."

"What makes lovemaking and reading resemble each other most is that within both of them times and spaces open, different from measurable time and space."

"Is she a prisoner with me? Is she my prisoner? Is she my prison?"

"Now it seems to me that everything that surrounds me is a part of me, that I have managed to become the whole, finally."

"There is thought in the universe--this is the constant from which we must set out every time."

"...I do not believe totality can be contained in language."

"Perhaps my true vocation was that of author of apocrypha, in the several meanings of the term: because writing always means hiding something in such a way that it then is discovered; because truth that can come from my pen is like a shard that has been chipped from a great boulder by a violent impact, then flung far away; because there is no certitude outside falsification."

"Where should banned books be found if not in prison?"

"How long are you going to let yourself be dragged passively by the plot?"

"The body is violent action! The body claims power! The body's at war!"

"You're the absolute protagonist of this book, very well; but do you believe that gives you the right to have carnal relations with all the female characters?"

"As for him, he wanted, on the contrary, to show her that behind the written page is the void: the world exists only as artifice, pretense, misunderstanding, falsehood."

"The world is reduced to a sheet of paper on which nothing can be written except absract words, as if all concreate nouns were finished..."

"The stimulus of reading is indispensable to me, and of meaty reading, even if, of every book, I manage to read no more than a few pages. But those few pages already enclose for me whole universes, which I can never exhaust."

"I read and reread, each time seeking the confirmation of a new discovery among the folds of the sentences."

"Every time I seek to relive the emotion of a previous reading, I experience different and unexpected impressions, and do not find again those of before. At certain moments it seems to me that between one reading and the next there is a progression: in the sense, for example, of penetrating further into the spirit of the text, or of increasing my critical detachment."

"For years, I have been coming to this library, and I explore it volume by volume, shelf by shelf, but I could demonstrate to you that I have done nothing but continue the reading of a single book."

"For a while now, everything has been going wrong for me: it seems to me that in the world there now exist only stories that remain suspended or get lost along the way." Read more!

Look At Me

Look At Me is a serpentine novel driven by ideas, theories about identity and modernity and the urban-rural rift in culture. This is not to say that the storyline is sufficiently lacking, just that the concepts brought up by Moose and elder Charlotte's narration are enough to write a philosophy thesis on. Jennifer Egan emphasizes the room for reinvention and dishonesty in the world of her second novel.

"After the accident, I became less visible. I don't mean in the obvious sense that I went to fewer parties and retreated from general view. Or not just that. I mean that after the accident, I became more difficult to see."

"The experience of that memory was like being hit, or kissed, unexpectedly. I blinked to recover from it."

"We talked about losing our virginity--not losing it, though, with all the haplessness that word implied, but yielding it up in a blaze of ecstasy that would leave us permanently altered."

"We sipped the dry, cold beers. It was so warm, we no longer needed our jackets. We were fresh and clean, yet from somewhere within us--below us, it almost seemed, down among the dead Swedes--came a weight that was palpable. The weight of our boredom, our impatience."

"Still, the intensity was punishing--we're killing each other, I thought. We're killing something."

"Why didn't I urge my friends to bring me casseroles and groceries and lounge with me on my sectional couch? Because I was weak. Oh, yes, that is the time when you need people most, I assured myself as the silence thumped at my ears. But you have to resist. Because once they've seen you like this, once they've witnessed your dull, uneven hair and raspy voice, your hesitancy and cringing need for love, your smell--the smell of your weakness!--they'll never forget, and long after you've regained your vitality, after you yourself have forgotten those exhibits of your weakness, they'll look at you and still see them."

"'But how long can it last, this reality thing?'"

"I'd been a safe-sex practioner since before the phrase existed, not for health reasons so much as a basic squeamishness at the idea of mingling cells. Embracing, kissing--even the grittier exchanges I had no problem with, but the things I couldn't see, the molecules and atoms--those should stay apart, I felt."

"I kept conversation to a minimum; if I let it go on long, I'd found, the man ceased to be attractive no matter what he looked like."

"We were strangers, with nothing to hide from each other."

"It was 10:30 A.M. and I was hugely drunk, full of joy and purpose and mischief. My only regret was over all the days of my life I'd spent sober. Why, when drinking wasn't illegal? Why had I deprived myself?"

"The silence between us felt endless, multigenerational, a silence in which I was fully aware of the earth turning slowly on its spit."

"I lied a lot, and with good reason: to protect the truth--safeguard it, like wearing fake gems to keep the real ones from getting stolen, or cheapened by overuse. I guarded what truths I possessed because information was not a thing--it was colorless, odorless, shapeless, and therefore indestructible. There was no way to retrieve or void it, no way to halt its proliferation. Telling someone a secret was like storing plutonium inside a sandwich bag; the information would inevitably outlive the friendship or love or trust in which you'd placed it. And then you would have given it away."

"I sensed him waiting for me to go, and yet I lingered, absurdly. Desperation upon desperation, I thought, but was too drunk to care."

"'Can you look at me and swear that everything you've said is absolutely true, that none of it is bullshit? There's no agenda hidden underneath, no ulterior motives--everything is exactly the way you've described it?'"

"He represented the last time I had believed in something that I no longer believed in."

"I had always believed my life would unfold in some more angular fashion. Instead, I'd virtually stepped from my childhood into this happiness."

"Being drunk made him feel more American."

"She was selfish, finally; selfish above all else. Nearly everyone was."

"There was a freshness in leaving behind one life for the next, a raw, tingling sensation that was one step short of pain. An imperative of the mind and spirit had reshaped the facts of his life like tides rearranging a shore."

"People were vines awaiting the chance to cling."

"Dreams were a problem--not only did they curdle his nights, but at times left a troubling residue that touched his days. He preferred not to dream at all."

"He felt an impulse to protect her, shield her from some proximate and overwhelming danger. But there was only himself."

"Being discovered felt like a discovery."

"'Don't you think it would be so amazing for girls to get regular surgeries on their faces so they'd always look different?' he asked. 'Like once a year, at least. I mean this changing the hair color every five months is so tired. Blond, black, blond, red--like oh, you're such a chameleon! I'm really into tissue, you know, the real human being.'"

"What was this feeling inside of me? I wondered. Peace of mind, but without the drunkenness. Peace of mind, but with something added; energy, maybe. I thought it might be happiness."

"'But if what happens next is that I write a book, won't I be writing a book about writing a book?'"

"...I thought about waiting--how vulnerable it made you. Because eventually you got tired. You got tired and you made a choice, you picked someone--or worse, someone picked you--and you believed he was the person you'd been waiting for. And you gave him everything."=

"There was a sweet, vulnerable feeling in the air, a postcoital tenderness."

"'You spend your whole life watching other people,' he said. 'I have a feeling it eats away your soul.'"

"What I loathed--what I'd always loathed--were the conversations people had tried to engage me in countless times over the years: you tell me how your father whipped you with a belt; I'll tell you how I was left to cry for hours in my room, how I wasn't allowed to play piano, how lonely and sad I felt as a child, and after that we'll be intimates, because each of us know who broke the other. There was nothing phonier in the world. It was no one's business who'd broken me; maybe I'd never been broken."

"I proceeded to the bar, ordered a double vodka and downed it. And in a single moment--the one during which I downed the drink--I traversed, with telescopic swiftness, the many gradations from mild tipsiness to staggering inebriation that I had savored at other points in my life, from fuzzy to toasted to totally gone--I swept through them all in one sip, one gulp (a gulp that encompassed a double vodka, it was true) and my arrival at the far end of the spectrum made me stagger. The room tipped on its side while my body strained to adjust to its new chemistry."

"I would submit that regardless of how many people one has touched in one's life, the very first time, whatever the occasion, is invariably interesting--to become creatures, rather than just voices and thoughts."

"If this was love, did she have it too? Did you need to say "love" for it to be love?"

"He marveled and puzzled and raged at the awful gap between his vision and other people's, at his own consistent failure to bridge it."

"Most of us are desperate for raw experience. We work in offices, dealing with intangibles; we go to lunch and talk to other people surrounded by intangibles. No one actually makes anything anymore."

"I had nothing left to sell!"

"I despised talking about myself. For years I had lied to avoid it, feinting and darting, obfuscating slyly, lying because it was easier, because I felt like it. Lying to erase the truth, though this never seemed to work. I knew I was thirty-five; I'd tried to forget, but the knowledge stayed in me. As a liar, I had failed."

"Masturbation: a word with all the sensuality of suitcases tumbling from a closet shelf, another one falling just when you think the noise has stopped. A futile and lonely act, I'd always thought, but I'd missed the boat, I decided now, misunderstood the joys to be had from declining to indroduce yet another human being into one's life."

"The past was up for sale."

"'I'm going to change,' I said stiffly. 'I'm in the process of changing.' After a moment I said, 'I've changed.'"

"'The less you say, the more excitement. This is human nature, my friend.'"

"Holding Charlotte's face, he came as near as he ever did, anymore, to feeling the rage he so desperately missed, rage and desire commingled; he imagined snapping her neck, crushing her skull between his palms, and the eroticism of that vision made him catch his breath. She had died a hundred different ways at his hands, but what he did instead was pull off her shirt and her clothes and do it that way, kill her as many times as she could take it."

"'This has nothing to do with America. We're all in here hiding from it.'"

"He took in the scene. I tried to do the same, but I couldn't see it. I'd been looking for too many years."

"We eyed each other with a pressure that was like a shove. After a while I got angry. Fuck you, I thought. But there was no backing down until he did. We're enemies. This came to me right in the middle of fucking. We'll kill each other one day."

"'I'm not saying make it up--I'm saying find the connections. Show us the buried logic. What I don't want is, I was bringing cookies to Aunt Susie and I got run over by a tractor. This is not a Raymond Carver story, if you're familiar with his work.'"

"'You're turning people into shopping malls.'"

"'See, it's the future,' he went on with a kind of apology. 'It's going to happen with or without you. But if you go with this thing, if you give yourself to it, you'll own that future; you'll be right in the heart of it.'"

"...she had stopped loving him. It amazed Anthony how distinct that feeling had been, like someone leaving a room."

"His presence made the air sing. Made me loopy. Buoyed me up on a reckless swell of freedom I hadn't felt in many years. I threw my arms around people and shouted into their ears. I jumped onto tables and danced. I expanded, trying to fill my exaggerated outline."

"'I love America. I love this crazy damn country. Where else does such beautiful insanity enter the realm of possibility?'"

"It was the reigning habit of mind in this land without history, this era when all relationships of time and space, of cause and effect, had been obliterated by the touch of a key. And so people were adrift, lacking any context by which to orient themselves, seeking to fill the breach with personal history, that diminuitive, myopic substitute."

"And information was the inversion of a thing; without shape or location of component parts. Without context. Not history but personal history."

"All you need to know is how to tell a story."

"It was a mystery why I cared--normally I was all in favor of mutual usage--but I couldn't forgive him."

"And here was the problem, here was the worry scrabbling like mice behind these brightly painted panels of picturesqueness: I was peeling apart in layers. I was breaking up into bits."

"He glanced at me, startled, then lifted the bottle again. It was the sort of drinking you really couldn't watch."

"I hadn't lain in bed with a man in so long: even a comatose one would be a luxury."

"An object was lodged in my chest, caught there; a fist-sized object that had to be expelled, an object consisting of words, a very small handful of words. I didn't want to say them. I was afraid to."

"There, I thought. it's gone. I said it and it's done, it's gone.
But of course it wasn't gone. It was indestructible."

"Simple things were becoming so much harder to do."

"A world remade by circuitry was a world without history or context or meaning, and because we are what we see, we are what we see, such a world was certainly headed toward death."

"I felt bad in a way that I associated with coming down from drugs. A glittering apparatus, dismantled piece by piece."

"It seemed perfect that we die together. A monument to the randomness and desperation that had united us."

"Life can't be sustained under the pressure of so many eyes."
Read more!

No One Belongs Here More Than You

It would be easy to simply dismiss this collection of short stories as just "quirky" or maybe "unconventional." Miranda July, most famous for her movie You Me and Everyone We Know, presents characters buried in struggle with abandonment and personal disappointment. The narrators take everything in stride, emoting capriciously and living largely in their own aloof world of personal relationships.

From "The Shared Patio":
"It still counts, even though it happened when he was unconscious. It counts doubly because the conscious mind often makes mistakes, falls for the wrong person."

"If you are sad, ask yourself why you are sad. Then pick up the phone and call someone and tell him or her the answer to the question. If you don't know anyone, call the operator and tell him or her. Most people don't know that the operator has to listen, it is a law. Also, the postman is not allowed to go inside your house, but you can talk to him on public property for up to four minutes or until he wants to go, whichever comes first."

"These days people are too angry for punching. What you might try is stabbing."

"Finally he paused and squinted up at the sky, and I guessed he was constructing the perfect question for me, a fantastic question that I would have to rise up to, drawing from everything I knew about myself and mythology and this black earth."

From "The Swim Team":
"And in time I realized that if the truth felt empty, then I probably would not be your girlfriend much longer."

From "Majesty":
"If there were a map of the solar system, but instead of stars it showed people and their degrees of separation, my star would be the one you had to travel the most light-years from to get to his. You would die getting to him. You could only hope that your grandchildren's children would get to him. But they wouldn't know what to do; they wouldn't know how to hold him."

"We come from long lines of people destined never to meet."

"People meet in bars every day, and they often have sex with people they meet in bars. My sister does this all the time, or she did when she was in college."

"I wondered how many other things had flown past me into death. Perhaps many. Perhaps I was flying past them, like the grim reaper, signaling the end. This would explain so much."

"This pain, this dying, this is just normal. This is how life is. In fact, I realize, there never was an earthquake. Life is just this way, broken, and I am crazy to hope for something else."

From "The Man on the Stairs":
"I was going to die and it was taking forever."

"I didn't want the man on the stairs knowing these things about us. But he would know. The second he threw on the lights and pulled out his gun, or his knife, or his heavy rock, the second he held the gun to my head, or the knife at my heart, or the heavy rock over my chest, he would know. He would see it in my boyfriend's eyes: You can have her, just let me live. And in my eyes, he would see the words: I never really knew true love. Would he empathize with us? Does he know what it's like? Most people do. You always feel like you are the only one in the world, like everyone else is crazy for each other, but it's not true. Generally, people don't like each other very much. And that goes for friends, too. Sometimes I lie in bed and try to decide which of my friends I truly care about, and I always come to the same conclusion: none of them. I thought these were just my starter friends and the real ones would come along later. But no. These are my real friends.

From "The Sister":
"We don't know anything. We don't know how to cure a cold or what dogs are thinking. We do terrible things, we make wars, we kill people out of greed. So who are we to say how to love."

"Some people are uncomfortable with silences. Not me. I've never cared much for call and response. Sometimes I will think of something to say and then I will ask myself: Is it worth it? And it just isn't."

"I had a joint once and I didn't feel right for a whole year."

From "This Person":
"This person realizes that staying home means blowing off everything this person has ever known."

"This person mourns the fact that she has ruined her chance to be loved by everyone; as this person climbs into bed, the weight of this tragedy seem to bear down upon this person's chest."

From "It Was Romance":
"Humans make their own worlds in the small area in front of their face."

"We had loved people we really shouldn't have loved and then married other people in order to forget our impossible loves, or we had once called out hello into the cauldron of the world and then run away before anyone could respond."

From "Something That Needs Nothing":
"In truth, I had not yet learned to hate anyone but my parents."

"There was no way I could ever be in love with her because she was just as pathetic as me."

"From the start, one is trained not to take off your clothes in front of complete strangers. Keeping one's clothes on is actually the number one rule for civilization."

From "The Boy From Lam Kien":
"If I was going to bring something new into my life, it would be a big starving thing. But I could not do that."

"The boy was growing bored and this was a form of growing up. I was getting depressed and this was my own fault."

"I understood completely about needing to hurt someone at the same time that you are giving them something."

"He picked up a book that was lying on the floor and held it in the air between his two fingers. The subtitle of the book was Keeping Love and Intimacy Alive in Committed Relationships. I was working through it, word by word. So far I had done Keeping and was just starting on Love."

From "Making Love in 2003":
"When you reach a certain saturation point, lovemaking becomes one endless vibration."

"It doesn't really feel like you're driving when you don't know where you're going. There should be an option on the car for driving in place, like treading water. Or at least a light that shines between the brake lights that you can turn on to indicate that you have no destination. I felt like I was fooling the other drivers and I just wanted to come clean."

"I wondered if I would spend the rest of my life inventing complicated ways to depress myself."

"When I began to write, it was out of fear. I thought I might forget, or pretend to forget, or pretend to pretend, or grow up."

"I fell into the eyes of every person I passed on the street."

"Not everyone has to be literate, there are some great reasons for resisting language, and one of them is love."

"We learned to be discreet. It helped that nobody really cares about anyone but themselves anyway. They check to make sure you aren't killing anyone, anyone they know, and then they go back to what they were saying about how they think they might be having a breakthrough in their relationship with themselves."

"I wept and curled and uncurled myself in a way I couldn't control. I was actually writhing in heartache, as if I were a single muscle whose purpose was to mourn."

"I don't believe in psychology, which says everything you do is because of yourself. That is so untrue. We are social animals, and everything we do is because of other people, because we love them, or because we don't."

From "Mon Plaisir":
"On the eighth day of the rest of my life, I began to wonder if this was really the rest of my life or just a continuation of the same one."

"She didn't need this like I did; she lived alone, she had a webcam, she had many, many options."

From "Birthmark":
"Poor people who win the lottery do not become rich people. They become poor people who won the lottery."

From "How to Tell Stories to Children":
"He didn't call me for a few weeks. This was customary within our friendship, confide and retreat, but I wondered. I wondered if perhaps our last conversation had been an overture. Not the conversation, exactly, but the silences within it."

"They were a wilderness that was too wild for me, they were living with bears, they were bears, their words flew past deadly animal teeth."

"Something in the way he said this gave me the feeling that the dynamic was moving on, perhaps down the block, where it would serve some other confused family. And we would be left dynamic-less, four people alone with all the wrong feelings for one another."

"I turned out the light, and we did not take off each other's clothes, but we took off our own clothes."

"Well, I have a theory that men don't actually cry less than women, they just do it differently. Since we never saw our fathers cry, we are each forced to invent our own unique method."

"Inelegantly and without my concern, time passed." Read more!