Everybody is identical in their secret unspoken belief that way deep down they are different from everyone else.
I do things like get in a taxi and say, "The library, and step on it.
The truth will set you free. But not until it is finished with you.
You will become way less concerned with what other people think of you when you realize how seldom they do.
We're all lonely for something we don't know we're lonely for. How else to explain the curious feeling that goes around feeling like missing somebody we've never even met?
Everything I’ve ever let go of has claw marks on it.
Try to learn to let what is unfair teach you.
Fiction’s about what it is to be a fucking human being.
It's weird to feel like you miss someone you're not even sure you know.
Whatever you get paid attention for is never what you think is most important about yourself.
The parts of me that used to think I was different or smarter or whatever, almost made me die.
How odd I can have all this inside me and to you it’s just words.
Acceptance is usually more a matter of fatigue than anything else.
It did what all ads are supposed to do: create an anxiety relievable by purchase.
I had kind of a midlife crisis at twenty which probably doesn’t augur well for my longevity
Lonely people tend, rather, to be lonely because they decline to bear the psychic costs of being around other humans. They are allergic to people. People affect them too strongly.
There's good self-consciousness, and then there's toxic, paralyzing, raped-by-psychic-Bedouins self-consciousness.
You have decided being scared is caused mostly by thinking.
Te Occidere Possunt Sed Te Edere Non Possunt Nefas Est" ("They can kill you, but the legalities of eating you are quite a bit dicier").
What goes on inside is just too fast and huge and all interconnected for words to do more than barely sketch the outlines of at most one tiny little part of it at any given instant.
...logical validity is not a guarantee of truth.
Everything takes time. Bees have to move very fast to stay still.
And Lo, for the Earth was empty of Form, and void. And Darkness was all over the Face of the Deep. And We said: 'Look at that fucker Dance.
The thing about people who are truly and malignantly crazy: their real genius is for making the people around them think they themselves are crazy. In military science this is called Psy-Ops, for your info.
Good fiction’s job is to comfort the disturbed and disturb the comfortable.
To be, in a word, unborable.... It is the key to modern life. If you are immune to boredom, there is literally nothing you cannot accomplish
I'd like to be the sort of person who can enjoy things at the time, instead of having to go back in my head and enjoy them.
I have filled 3 Mead notebooks trying to figure out whether it was Them or Just Me.
True heroism is minutes, hours, weeks, year upon year of the quiet, precise, judicious exercise of probity and care—with no one there to see or cheer. This is the world.
The interesting thing is why we're so desperate for this anesthetic against loneliness.
Sarcasm and jokes were often the bottle in which clinical depressives sent out their most plangent screams for someone to care and help them.
... That no single, individual moment is in and of itself unendurable.
Every love story is a ghost story.
Mary had a little lamb, its fleece electrostatic / And everywhere Mary went, the lights became erratic.
I never, even for a moment, doubted what they’d told me. This is why it is that adults and even parents can, unwittingly, be cruel: they cannot imagine doubt’s complete absence. They have forgotten.
I'd tell you all you want and more, if the sounds I made could be what you hear
The integrity of my sleep has been forever compromised, sir.
Mediocrity is contextual.
There are no choices without personal freedom, Buckeroo. It's not us who are dead inside. These things you find so weak and contemptible in us---these are just the hazards of being free.
God seems to have a kind of laid-back management style I’m not crazy about.
Quentin Tarantino is interested in watching somebody's ear getting cut off; David Lynch is interested in the ear.
Psychotics, say what you want about them, tend to make the first move.
The sun like a sneaky keyhole view of hell.
Why not? Why not?Why not not, then, if the best reasoning you can contrive is why not?
I don't think writers are any smarter than other people. I think they may be more compelling in their stupidity, or in their confusion.
Truly decent, innocent people can be taxing to be around.
...morning is the soul's night.
You are what you love. No? You are, completely and only, what you would die for without, as you say, the thinking twice.
This is so American, man: either make something your god and cosmos and then worship it, or else kill it.
I am not what you see and hear.
I like the fans’ sound at night. Do you? It’s like somebody big far away goes like: it’sOKit’sOKit’sOKit’sOK, over and over. From very far away.
The assumption that you everyone else is like you. That you are the world. The disease of consumer capitalism. The complacent solipsism.
Almost nothing important that ever happens to you happens because you engineer it.
...the most obvious, ubiquitous, important realities are often the ones that are hardest to see and talk about.
...most Substance-addicted people are also addicted to thinking, meaning they have a compulsive and unhealthy relationship with their own thinking.
To make someone an icon is to make him an abstraction, and abstractions are incapable of vital communication with living people.
There is no hatred in my love for you. Only a sadness I feel all the more strongly for my inability to explain or describe it.
My bones are ringing the way sometimes people say their ears are ringing, I'm so tired.
That everything is on fire, slow fire, and we're all less than a million breaths away from an oblivion more total than we can even bring ourselves to even try to imagine...
He suddenly felt nothing, or rather Nothing, a pre-tornadic stillness of zero sensation, as if he were the very space he occupied.
In reality, there is no such thing as not voting: you either vote by voting, or you vote by staying home and tacitly doubling the value of some Diehard's vote.
... it takes great personal courage to let yourself appear weak.
Hell hath no fury like a coolly received postmodernist.
Tell them there are no holes for your fingers in the masks of men. Tell them how could you ever even hope to love what you can't grab onto.
All I'm saying is that it's shortsighted to blame TV. It's simply another symptom. TV didn't invent our aesthetic childishness here any more than the Manhattan Project invented aggression.
Capital T-truth is about life before death.
Words and a book and a belief that the world is words...
American experience seems to suggest that people are virtually unlimited in their need to give themselves away, on various levels. Some just prefer to do it in secret.
Everything in my own immediate experience supports my deep belief that I am the absolute center of the universe, the realest, most vivid and important person in existence.
Everything I’ve ever let go of had claw marks on it.
I don't want to hurt myself. I want to stop hurting.
I wish you way more than luck.
There are secrets within secrets, though--always.
...Genuine pathological openness is about as seductive as Tourette's Syndrome.
I am concentrating docilely on the question why U.S. restrooms always appear to us as infirmaries for public distress, the place to reagain control.
It is named the "Web" for good reason.
The true thoughts that go on inside us are just too fast and huge and all interconnected for words to do more than barely sketch the outlines of, at most, one tiny little part of us at any given instant.
It's all very confusing. I think I'm very honest and candid, but I'm also proud of how honest and candid I am -- so where does that put me?
Look. Listen. Use ears I'd be proud to call our own. Listen to the silence behind the engines' noise. Jesus, Sweets, listen. Hear it? It's a love song. For whom? You are loved.
To experience commitment as the loss of options, a type of death, the death of childhood's limitless possibility, of the flattery of choice without duress-this will happen, mark me. Childhood's end.
Life's endless war against the self you cannot live without.
The severing of an established connection is exponentially more painful than the rejection of an attempted connection.
When a solipsist dies ... everything goes with him.
I'm screaming for help and everybody's acting as if I'm singing Ethel Merman covers...
Yes, I'm paranoid — but am I paranoid enough?
Please learn the pragmatics of expressing fear: sometimes words that seem to express really invoke. This can be tricky.
And he wishes, in the cold quiet of his archer's heart, that he himself could feel the intensity of their reconciliations as strongly as he feels that of their battles.
There are very few innocent sentences in writing.
That it is statistically easier for low-IQ people to kick an addiction than it is for high-IQ people...That boring activities become, perversely, much less boring if you concentrate intently on them.
I'm just afraid of having a tombstone that says HERE LIES A PROMISING OLD MAN.
The job of the first eight pages is not to have the reader want to throw the book at the wall, during the first eight pages.
-the soul's certainty that the day will have to be not traversed but sort of climbed, vertically, and then that going to sleep again at the end of it will be like falling, again, off something tall and sheer.
My worst character flaw that I'm conscious of is that I tend to think my way into circles instead of resolving anything. It's paralyzing and boring for people around me.
Not that that mystical stuff's necessarily true: The only thing that's capital-T true is that you get to decide how you're going to try to see it.
This is water.
She committed suicide by putting her extremities down the garbage disposal-first one arm and then, kind of miraculously if you think about it, the other arm.
She took a sort of abject pride in her mecilessness toward herself.
Worship your body, beauty, and sexual allure and you will die a million deaths before they finally grieve you.
That what appears to be egoism so often isn't.
The depressed person was in terrible and unceasing pain, and the impossibility of sharing or articulating this pain was itself a component of the pain and a contributing factor in its essential horror.
