“The so-called ‘psychotically depressed’ person who tries to kill herself doesn’t do so out of quote ‘hopelessness’ or any abstract conviction that life’s assets and debits do not square. And...”
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Author detail
American novelist, short-story writer, and essayist whose dense works provide a dark, often satirical analysis of American culture
Quotes
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“The so-called ‘psychotically depressed’ person who tries to kill herself doesn’t do so out of quote ‘hopelessness’ or any abstract conviction that life’s assets and debits do not square. And...”
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“Everybody is identical in their secret unspoken belief that way deep down they are different from everyone else.”
“The truth will set you free. But not until it is finished with you.”
“The really important kind of freedom involves attention, and awareness, and discipline, and effort, and being able truly to care about other people and to sacrifice for them, over and over,...”
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“To me, at least in retrospect, the really interesting question is why dullness proves to be such a powerful impediment to attention. Why we recoil from the dull. Maybe it’s because dullness...”
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“Mary had a little lamb, its fleece electrostatic / And everywhere Mary went, the lights became erratic.”
“The integrity of my sleep has been forever compromised, sir.”
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“Everything takes time. Bees have to move very fast to stay still.”
“It's always seemed a little preposterous that Hamlet, for all his paralyzing doubt about everything, never once doubts the reality of the ghost. Never questions his own madness might not in...”
“This is why they started us here so young: to give ourselves away before the age when the questions 'why' and 'to what' grow real beaks and claws.”
“We are all dying to give our lives away to something, maybe. God or Satan, politics or grammar, topology or philately (...) To games or needles, to some other person.”
“Because here's something else that's weird but true: in the day-to day trenches of adult life, there is actually no such thing as atheism. There is no such thing as not worshipping. Everybod...”
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“So tonight to shush you how about if I say I have administrative bones to pick with God, Boo. I'll say God seems to have a kind of laid-back management style I'm not crazy about. I'm pretty...”
“That sometimes human beings have to just sit in one place and, like, hurt. That you will become way less concerned with what other people think of you when you realize how seldom they do. Th...”
“Worship your body, beauty, and sexual allure and you will die a million deaths before they finally grieve you.”
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“Think of the old cliché about the mind being 'an excellent servant but a terrible master'. This, like many clichés, so lame & banal on the surface, actually expresses a great & terrible trut...”
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“Why is the truth usually not just un- but anti-interesting?”
“I felt despair. The word’s overused and banalified now, despair, but it’s a serious word, and I’m using it seriously. For me it denotes a simple admixture — a weird yearning for death combin...”
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“I'm so scared of dying without ever being really seen. Can you understand?”
“When a solipsist dies ... everything goes with him.”