I will not wait to love as best as I can. We thought we were young and that there would be time to love well sometime in the future. This is a terrible way to think. It is no way to live, to wait to love.
But everyone disappears, no matter who loves them.
If you don’t want anyone to know about your existence, you might as well kill yourself. You’re taking up space, air.
There’s less need to slowly acclimate these guys to the tank,” Bailey said. “They’ll be food pretty soon, so their happiness is less important than the shark’s.
He must trust, and he must have faith. And so he builds, because what is building, and rebuilding and rebuilding again, but an act of faith?
You have what I can afford to give. You are a panhandler, begging for anything, and I am the man walking briskly by, tossing a quarter or so into your paper cup. I can afford to give you this. This does not break me.
How had this happened? Everyone in the world knew more than us, about everything, and this I hated then found hugely comforting.
Everyone in the life before was cranky, I think, because they just wanted to know.–After I Was Thrown in the River and Before I Drowned
Books have a unique way of stopping time in a particular moment and saying: Let’s not forget this.
I hung up the phone, jubilant, and threw myself into a wall, then pretended to be getting electrocuted. I do this when I’m very happy.
He was warm, partly because he had on many layers, and partly because boys whoa re part wolf and part wind do not get cold.
All we really want is for no one to have a boring life, to be impressive, so we can be impressed. ~ on the friends we choose.
Your memory has always been given to opportunistic revision.
This was a new skill she’d acquired, the ability to look, to the outside world, utterly serene and even cheerful, while, in her skull, all was chaos.
Ty swept his arms around, encompassing everything around them, the vast campus above. “All this. The fucking shark that eats the world.
Love is implicit in every connection. It should be. Thus when absent it makes us insane. (You Shall Know Our Velocity)
Everyone will be tracked, cradle to grave, with no possibility of escape.
We are all feeding from each other, all the time, every day.
The idea we came up with, well before we left, was something we coined Performance Literature. Excuse the use of that second word, because I realize it’s presumptuous. Also, excuse the first word, and the term in general.
How lame this is, how small, terrible. Or maybe it is beautiful. I can’t decide if what I am doing is beautiful and noble and right, or small and disgusting.
I lost someone very close to me and afterward I believed I could have saved him had I been a better friend to him. But everyone disappears, no matter who loves them.
I should probably get a stone. A stone would be good. A stone would save me, would salvage all the damage we had already done, all the things we had given up or lost.
Grief doesn’t arrive on schedule, as much as we’d like to.
The men who are dropped in a jungle or a desert and expected video games and got mundanity and depravity and friends dying like animals.
If you don’t have something grand for men like us to be part of, we will take apart all the little things. Neighbourhood by neighbourhood. Building by building. Family by family.
We would oppose the turning of the planet and refuse the setting of the sun.
We have no choice. We need the communion of souls and only here are they awake.
Suffering is only suffering if it’s done in silence, in solitude. Pain experienced in public, in view of loving millions, was no longer pain. It was communion.
For a moment, she thought it natural in a way seeing a plane fall from the sky can seem natural, too. The horror comes later.
It was a broken world, I knew then, that would allow a boy such as me to bury a boy such as William K.
You still know that boy. He was very angry at fourteen, fifteen, in summer and winter, at home or in the world. So angry that his face contorted in photos. The camera was a question and his face did not know the answer.
Who were these people, all of them young couples, a few fabulous ones, tall thin-haired blondes with toned men in perfectly pressed jeans — neither fearing the loss of the other.
The raising of a child is the building of a cathedral. You can’t cut corners.
Did children want sports cars for parents? No. They wanted Hondas. They wanted to know that the car would start in all seasons.
Why do you want to be on The Real World?-Because I want everyone to witness my youthWhy?-Isn’t it gorgeous?
His frustration with some Americans was like that of a disappointed parent. He was so content in this country, so impressed with and loving of its opportunities, but then why, sometimes, did Americans fall short of their best selves?
This democracy thing, or Demoxie, whatever it is, good god. Under the guise of having every voice heard, you create mob rule, a filterless society where secrets are crimes.
It is very much, she thinks, like looking at the moon and knowing one could make it there, too. It is only time and breath that stand between her and the top. She is young. She’ll do it and have done it.
Surveillance shouldn’t be the tradeoff for any goddamn service we get.
It was like setting up a guillotine in the public square.You don’t expect a thousand people to line up to put their heads in it.
Now, you and I both know that if you can control the flow of information, you can control everything.
Why shouldn’t your curiosity about the world be rewarded?
I wondered quickly if I’d give my life so that a dragon could live. If someone offered me that deal, your life for the existence of dragons.I thought maybe yes, maybe no.
People worried about our passing over into some robotic state, but we were so much like robots already, programmed and easy to manipulate.
The issue is complex, but like many matters in Sudan, it is not as complex as Khartoum would want the west to believe.
That’s what’s new. There used to be the option of opting out. But now that’s over. Completion is the end. We’re closing the circle around everyone—it’s a totalitarian nightmare.
You look at pictures of Nepal, push a smile button, and you think that’s the same as going there.
No. There is no balance, and no retribution, and no rules. The rules and balances you blather about are hopeful creations of a man fearing death.
You and I read the same books and hear the same sermons and we come away with different messages. That has to be evidence of some serious problem, right?
Dignity is an affectation, cute but eccentric, like learning French or collecting scarves.
You see pictures of Buddha and he’s sitting, reclining, at peace. The Hindus have their twelve-armed elephant god, who also seems so content but not powerless. But leave it to Christians to have a dead and bloody man nailed to a cross.
The Earth is an animal that shakes off its fleas when they dig too deep, bite too hard.
The death of a young person for no reason is an apocalypse.
It was just an idea I had, that it could be cool to have a book covered in fake fur.
So this is the space during tutoring hours. It’s very busy. Same principles: one-on-one attention, complete devotion to the students’ work and a boundless optimism and sort of a possibility of creativity and ideas.
I can remember exactly where I sat when my teacher first read Roald Dahl’s ‘James and the Giant Peach’.
It’s not that our family has no taste, it’s just that our family’s taste is inconsistent.
McSweeney’s as a publishing company is built on a business model that only works when we sell physical books. So we try to put a lot of effort into the design and production of the book-as-object.