- To stand here and try to fix her life is just a big waste of time. People don't want their lives fixed. Nobody wants their problems solved. Their dramas. Their distractions. Their stories resolved. Their messes cleaned up. Because what would they have left? Just the big scary unknown.
- We're all miserable together.
- People used what they called a telephone because they hated being close together and they were too scared of being alone.
- In the outside world, he told me, there was no real silence. Not the fake silence you get when you plug your ears so you hear nothing but your heart, but real out-of-doors silence.
- On a night without the moon or stars you can't see a thing, but you can imagine anything.
- Even after sixteen years of cleaning people's houses, I want to think the world is getting better and better, but really I know it's not. You want there to be some improvement in people, but there won't be. And you want to think there's something you can get done.
- Still, just one time, I'd like to prove I know something better. I can do more than just cover up. The world can be a lot better than we settle for. All you have to do is ask.
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- A girl calls and asks, "Does it hurt very much to die?"
- Well, sweetheart, I tell her, yes, but it hurts a lot more to keep living.
- It felt good to stand out from the world, just mysterious and pious. You weren't a lantern under any basket. You stood out righteous as a sore thumb.
- Honest is how I want to look. The truth doesn't glitter and shine.
- Maybe what I liked most about dancing is the rules. In the world where anything goes, here are solid arbitrary rules. The Fox-trot is two slow steps and two fast. The Cha-Cha is two slow and three fast. The choreography, the discipline, isn't up for debate.
- I just didn't want to be fixed.
- Whatever my real problems might be, I didn't want them cured. None of the little secrets inside me wanted to be found and explained away. By myths. By my childhood. By chemistry. My fear was, what would be left? So none of my real grudges and dreads ever came out into the light of day. I didn't want to resolve any angst. I'd never talk about my dead family. Express my grief, she called it. Resolve it. Leave it behind.
- The secret is to not let you imagination get carried away.
-
- We thought all this teaching was to make us smart.
- What it did was make us stupid.
- With all the little facts we learned, we never had the time to think. None of us ever considered what life would be like cleaning up after a stranger every day. Washing dishes all day. Feeding a stranger's children. Mowing a lawn. All day. Painting houses. Year after year. Ironing bedsheets.
- Forever and ever.
- Work without end.
- Because I have to do something, make some noise, shout, scream, cry, swear, howl, I laugh. It's all just different ways to vent.
- There is no Hell. There is no heaven.
- It does not matter. The joke is we all have the same punch line.
- There's a terrible dark joy when the only person who knows all your secrets is finally dead. Your parents. Your doctor. Your therapist. Your caseworker. The sun's outside the bathroom window trying to show us we're all being stupid. All you have to do is look around.
- "The truth is," he says, "nothing new ever happens."
- "Reality means you live until you die," the agent says. "The real truth is nobody wants reality."
- Everything we did to fix me had side effects we had to fix. Then the fixes had side effects to fix and so on and so on.
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- There are only patterns, patterns on top of patterns, patterns that affect other patterns. Patterns hidden by patterns. Patterns within patterns.
- If you watch close, history does nothing but repeat itself.
- What we call chaos is just patterns we haven't recognized. What we call random is just patterns we can't decipher. What we can't understand we call nonsense. What we can't read we call gibberish.
- There is no free will.
- There are no variables.
- "There is only the inevitable," Fertility says. "There's only one future. You don't have a choice."
- The bad news is we don't have any control.
- The good news is you can't make any mistakes.
- The problem is disaster movies have everybody expecting too much from nature.
- Don't ask me when because I don't remember, but somewhere along the way I keep forgetting to commit suicide.
- Here are the shadows left behind by a thousand moments, a thousand moods, of needs traced here on the wall by men who are gone. Here is the record of their being here. Their visit. Their passing. Here's what the caseworker would call a primary source document.
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- "We all watch the same television programs," the mouth says. "We all hear the same things on the radio, we all repeat the same talk to each other. There are no surprises left. There's just more of the same. Reruns."
- Inside the hole, the red lips say, "We all grew up with the same television shows. It's like we all have the same artificial memory implants. We remember almost none of our real childhoods, but we remember everything that happened to sitcom families. We have the same basic goals. We all have the same fears."
- The lips say, "The future is not bright."
- "Pretty soon, we'll all have the same thoughts at the same time. We'll b in perfect unison. Synchronized. United. Equal. Exact. The way ants are. Insectile. Sheep."
- Everything is so derivative.
- A reference to a reference to a reference.
- "The big question people ask isn't 'What's the nature of existence?' " the mouth says. "The big question people ask is 'What's that from?' "
- It's weird how the name outlives the person, the signifier outlasts the signified, the symbol the symbolized.
- No matter how many luxuries you get, something will be missing. No matter how carefully you choose, you'll never be totally happy.
- The whole world is a disaster waiting to happen.
- Maybe after everybody dying around me, I've just developed a skill for losing people. A natural talent. A blessing.
- In the sky overhead, it's the same sun watching us make the same mistakes over and over. It's the same blue sky after everything we've been through. Nothing new. No surprises here.
sep 1 2013 ∞
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