Name: Story of My Life
ISBN: 9780747541578

Synopsis

"In the late eighties, New York has achieved an almost anarchic state of frenzy. Stockbrokers talk like artists, artists talk like stockbrokers, and everyone acts like there's no tomorrow. Alison, well, she's lucky if she can make it to her acting class. Each night is a new adventure, not infrequently catastrophic, from restaurants to clubs in a whirl of old boyfriends and new dilemmas. Several months ahead of Vogue and several checks behind in rent, Alison and her friends run on cocaine and their fathers' credit cards, and suffer various fixations--the perfect Chanel suit, blasé lust, familiarity with the rich and infamous--that make life less a party than an ordeal. In fact, her friends are developing habits that even Alison finds alarming; and when her sister blows into town, emotional bankruptcy isn't likely to be far behind"--From publisher description.

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About Jay McInerney

Jay McInerney

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Quotes

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“Every instinct that is found in any man is in all men. The strength of the emotion may not be so overpowering, the barriers against possession not so insurmountable, the urge to accomplish the desire less keen. With some, inhibitions and urges may be neutralized by other tendencies. But with every being the primal emotions are there. All men have an emotion to kill; when they strongly dislike some one they involuntarily wish he was dead. I have never killed any one, but I have read some obituary notices with great satisfaction.”

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“The one I felt and still feel most is lack of time. I used to have time to think, to reflect, my mind and I. We would sit together of an evening and listen to the inner melodies of the spirit, which one hears only in leisure moments when the words of some loved poet touch a deep, sweet chord in the soul that until then had been silent. But in college there is no time to commune with one's thoughts. One goes to college to learn, it seems, not to think. When one enters the portals of learning, one leaves the dearest pleasures--solitude, books and imagination--outside with the whispering pines. I suppose I ought to find some comfort in the thought that I am laying up treasures for future enjoyment, but I am improvident enough to prefer present joy to hoarding riches against a rainy day.”

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“I have always felt that doubt was the beginning of wisdom, and the fear of God was the end of wisdom.”

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“For, after all, every one who wishes to gain true knowledge must climb the Hill Difficulty alone, and since there is no royal road to the summit, I must zigzag it in my own way. I slip back many times, I fall, I stand still, I run against the edge of hidden obstacles, I lose my temper and find it again and keep it better, I trudge on, I gain a little, I feel encouraged, I get more eager and climb higher and begin to see the widening horizon. Every struggle is a victory. One more effort and I reach the luminous cloud, the blue depths of the sky, the uplands of my desire.”

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