Sometimes the sins you haven’t committed are all you have left to hold onto.
Everyone looks retarded once you set your mind to it.
Like all of my friends, she’s a lousy judge of character.
We were not a hugging people. In terms of emotional comfort it was our belief that no amount of physical contact could match the healing powers of a well made cocktail.
At the end of a miserable day, instead of grieving my virtual nothing, I can always look at my loaded wastepaper basket and tell myself that if I failed, at least I took a few trees down with me.
Speed eliminates all doubt. Am I smart enough? Will people like me? Do I really look all right in this plastic jumpsuit?
I’m the most important person in the lives of almost everyone I know and a good number of the people I’ve never even met.
Oh, for Christ’s sake,’ I hear. ‘Can we please just try to have a good time?’ This is like ordering someone to find you attractive, and it doesn’t work. I’ve tried it.
All I do is lie, and that has made me immune to compliments.
The landscape is best described as ‘pedestrian hostile.’ It’s pointless to try to take a walk, so I generally just stay in the room and think about shooting myself in the head.
A good [short story] would take me out of myself and then stuff me back in, outsized, now, and uneasy with the fit.
but I have no mind for business and considered staying awake to be enough of an accomplishment.
There seemed to be some correlation between devotion to God and a misguided zeal for marshmallows.
He die one day, and then he go above of my head to live with your father.”He weared the long hair, and after he died, the first day he come back here for to say hello to the peoples.”He nice, the Jesus.
I’m dating myself, but this was before Jesus Christ. We worshiped a God named Sashatiba, who had five eyes, including one on the Adam’s apple.
I hate you’ she said to me one afternoon. ‘I really, really hate you.’ Call me sensitive, but I couldn’t help but take it personally.
The combination of ammonia and chloride can be lethal but I’ve discovered it can work miracles as long as you keep telling yourself, “I want to love, I want to live…
Faced with an exciting question, science tended to provide the dullest possible answer.
Certain motherfuckers think they can fuck with my shit, but you can’t kill the Rooster. You might can fuck him up some times, but, bitch, nobody kills the motherfucking Rooster. You know what I’m saying?
I don’t know why it was, exactly, but nothing irritated my father quite like the sound of his children’s happiness. Group crying, he could stand, but group laughing was asking for it, especially at the dinner table.
If you are any kind of an artist, then validation … can be a result, but you’re going to do the work anyway. Because you’re just wired that way. It’s so engrained, it’s such a part of your personality that you don’t just stop doing it.
The houses looked like something a child might draw, a row of shaky squares with triangles on top. Add a door, add two windows. Think of putting a tree in the front yard, and then decide against it because branches aren’t worth the trouble.
Look at yourself on the day that you graduated from college, then look at yourself today. I did that recently and it was like, ‘Yikes! What the hell happened?
I find it ridiculous to assign a gender to an inanimate object incapable of disrobing and making an occasional fool of itself.
In Japanese and Italian, the response to [“How are you?”] is “I’m fine, and you?” In German it’s answered with a sigh and a slight pause, followed by “Not so good.
I asked her, dreamily, if we had met, and when she told me that we had not, I gave her a little finger wave, the type a leprechaun might offer a pixie who was floating by on a maple leaf. “Well, hi there,” I whispered.
People are often frightened of Parisians, but an American in Paris will find no harsher critic than another American.
He has a passport,” my classmates would whisper. “Quick, let’s run before he judges us!
I hoped our lives would continue this way forever, but inevitably the past came knocking. Not the good kind that was collectible but the bad kind that had arthritis.
But instead I am applying for a job as an elf. Even worse than applying is the very real possibility that I will not be hired, that I couldn’t even find work as an elf. That’s when you know you’re a failure.
A zoo is a good place to make a spectacle of yourself, as the people around you have creepier, more photogenic things to look at.
I’d tried to straighten him out, but there’s only so much you can do for a person who thinks Auschwitz is a brand of beer.
All of us take pride and pleasure in the fact that we are unique, but I’m afraid that when all is said and done the police are right: it all comes down to fingerprints.
If you read someone else’s diary, you get what you deserve.
It’s safe to assume that by 2085 guns will be sold in vending machines but you won’t be able to smoke anywhere in America.
It bothered me that the bag bothered me more than head did, but what are you going to do? A person doesn’t conciously choose what he focuses on. Those things choose you, and, once they do, nothing, it seems, can shake them.
The things I’ve bought from strangers in the dark would curl your hair.
My first semester I had only nine students. Hoping they might view me as professional and well prepared, I arrived bearing name tags fashioned in the shape of maple leaves.
I realized I was a teacher when I felt warm during class and got up to open the door. Later on there was noise in the hallway, so I got up and shut it. Students can’t open and close the door whenever they feel like it.
Adrienne started teaching a few months ago in Denver and wrote that it leaves you with a constant feeling of deceiving people. That you know nothing they don’t, or couldn’t learn on their own if they cared to.
The way I saw it, if my students were willing to pretend I was a teacher, the least I could do was return the favor and pretend that they were writers.
Being locked up is one thing, but to have no concept of confinement, to be ignorant of its terms and never understand that struggle is useless – that’s what hell must be like.
The thought of killing myself had slowed me down to five miles per hour. The thought of killing someone else stopped me completely.
I love things made out of animals. It’s just so funny to think of someone saying, “I need a letter opener. I guess I’ll have to kill a deer.
Nobody likes having a problem, but having a convoluted, bureaucratic one is even more galling.
On a busy day twenty-two thousand people come to visit Santa, and I was told that it is an elf’s lot to remain merry in the face of torment and adversity. I promised to keep that in mind.
I was just struggling with my inner vachette and pondering the depths of my own inhumanity.
My conscience is crosswired with my sweat glands, but there’s a short in the system and I break out over things I didn’t do, which only makes me look more suspect.
Each one of us is left to choose our own quality of life and take pleasure where we find it with the understanding that, like Mom used to say, sooner or later something’s gonna get you.
Scream at the mangled leather carcass lying at the foot of the stairs, and my parents would roar with laughter. “That’s what you get for leaving your wallet on the kitchen table.
If some people are “outed,” are other people “inned”? Can we say that someone has been “besided” or “overed”?
The guilt applies only to those things that are being given away for free.
It was my friend Frank, a writer in San Francisco, who finally set me straight. When asked about my new look he put down his fork and stared at me for a few moments. “A bow tie announces to the world you can no longer get an erection.
It’s not lost on me that I’m so busy recording life, I don’t have time to really live it.
I’m not a parent myself, but I think the best solution at this point is to slap that child across the face. It won’t stop crying, but at least now it’ll be doing it for a good reason.
There are things you forget naturally-computer passwords, your father’s continuing relationship with life-and then there are things you can’t forget that you wish you could.
I just looked at the pattern of my life, decided I didn’t like it, and changed.
The humor section is the last place an author wants to be. They put your stuff next to collections of Cathy cartoons.
When I look at a lot of older stuff that I’ve written, I think one sign of amateur humor writing is when you see people trying too hard.
My family isn’t really all that different from anyone else’s. Well, maybe they’re a bit more entertaining.
I love things made out of animals. It’s just so funny to think of someone saying, ‘I need a letter opener. I guess I’ll have to kill a deer.