- It seemed that moment would last forever. That you had to risk your life to get love. You had to get right to the edge of death to ever be saved.
- "Art never comes from happiness."
- And the kid is stupid enough to think a picture or a sculpture or a story could somehow replace anybody you love.
- It's hard to swallow, but this is the stupid, lazy, ridiculous little kid who just stood shaking, squinting into the glare and the roar, and who thought the future would be so bright. Picture anybody growing up so stupid he didn't know that hope is just another phase you'll grow out of. Who thought you could make something, anything, that would last forever.
- Because supposedly, those who forget the past are condemned to repeat it.
- The truth is, every son raised by a single mom is pretty much born married. I don't know, but until your mom dies it seems like all the other women in your life can never be more than just your mistress.
- The only person we'll hate more than each other is ourselves.
- The stupid shit we do for money.
- "It helps to remember the first time for everything."
- He was assaulting the world by assaulting himself.
- And it's funny how when somebody saves you, the first thing you want to do is save other people. All other people. Everybody.
- I stop. I feel my heart ache, but I've forgotten what the feeling means.
- You gain power by pretending to be weak. By contrast, you make people feel so strong. You save people by letting them save you.
- People will jump through hoops if you just make them feel like a god.
- It's all so easy. It's not about looking good, at least not on the surface―but you still win. Just let yourself be broken and humiliated. Just your whole life, keep telling people, I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. . . .
- There's an opposite to déjà vu. They call it jamais vu. It's when you meet the same people or visit places, again and again, but each time is the first. Everybody is always a stranger. Nothing is ever familiar.
- "Sometimes," Denny says and sniffs, "it's like I want to be beaten and punished. It's okay if there isn't a God anymore, but I still want to respect something. I don't want to be the center of my own universe."
- "It's pathetic," Paige says, "how we can't live with the things we can't understand. How if we can't explain something we'll just deny it."
- It's funny how the beauty of art has so much more to do with the frame than with the artwork itself.
- After you find out all the things that can go wrong, your life becomes less about living and more about waiting.
- Everybody wants more excitement from their life than they'll ever get.
- Sometimes a euphemism is more true than what it's supposed to hide.
- Language, she said, was just our way to explain away the wonder and the glory of the world. To deconstruct. To dismiss. She said people can't deal with how beautiful the world really is. How it can't be explained and understood.
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- The laws that keep us safe, these same laws condemn us to boredom.
- Without access to true chaos, we'll never have true peace.
- Unless everything can get worse, it won't get any better.
- The unreal is more powerful than the real.
- If you can change the way people think, she said. The way they see themselves. The way they see the world. If you do that, you can change the way people live their lives. And that's the only lasting thing you can create.
- Love is bullshit. Emotion is bullshit. I am a rock. A jerk. I'm an uncaring asshole and proud of it.
- It's pathetic how we can't live with the things we can't understand. How we need everything labeled and explained and deconstructed. Even if it's for sure unexplainable. Even God.
- "Anything you can acquire," she says, "is only another thing you'll lose."
- Because once you've crossed some lines, you just keep crossing them.
- She said, "Because the only frontier left is the world of intangibles, ideas, stories, music, art."
sep 1 2013 ∞
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