Quotes from Jonathan Goldstein

Everyone runs around trying to find a place where they still serve breakfast because eating breakfast, even if it's 5 o'clock in the afternoon, is a sign that the day has just begun and good things can still happen. Having lunch is like throwing in the towel.

Certain voices hold this odd pull on our heartstrings. They are like sad oboes or something, something that makes you want to throw all your money at the radio while yelling, "I love you." I don't know what it is.

We want more than there is.

he rubbed his feet back and forth on the library carpet and when she walked by, he touched her with the tip of his index finger

When he heard his father call out for Abel and he saw his borther go forth, it made him feel like he was nothing. He couldn't even say that he felt like Cain anymore. One could not feel like Cain because it had no flavor. Cain was the absence of flavor. Cain was like saliva or a Wednesday.

How strange to feel yourself falling in love with someone you've only just met.

How do you get over a first love?" he asks. "You never do," Howard says. "It just stays with you and becomes a part of who you are.

Even so tiny a loss has the power to still feel like a loss.

But I am enjoying the feeling of inbetweenness — that not-yet-being-settled feeling — and I plan on dragging it out as long as I can, because its a state of grace where all things are permissible.

In sleep things are simpler. No regret over the past. No worry for the future. Only the present. And as bad as a dream gets, at least you get to sleep through it.

I felt like a young Tony Montana having come to America, except the only person I wanted to kill was myself.

When David wasn't ruling, he would ponder all the various forms of laughter there could be. So far, he had only categorized four: laughter at your own expense, laughter at the expense of others, laughter at the human predicament, and laughter at small animals falling off tables.

If you could jerk off to something else, like a hamburger, could you imagine the delight in being alive?

What is it about legs? Or what is it about breasts? Or the small of the back? What is it about anything? One day there will be no difference between anything. It'll all be the exact same thing. One day you'll look in the dictionary and there will be only one word and you'll just have to make do.

The first hands he heard banging at the outside walls felt like nails pushing into his temples. Then there were more hands. Pounding. Punching. Scratching. Then kicks and shrieking that even drowned out the sound of the rain. The worst was when Ham could make out individual voices. He could hear their neighbor Zebeleh and her little daughter Ariel

And of course there was the loss of women, some of whom he still woke up aching for. He'd study their remnants alone at night - slips of paper bearing old phone numbers. Photographs. A mitten. In bed he would stare at the ceiling, trying to seize on the exact feeling of a particular woman's head on his chest. It's weight, the smell of her hair.

As you get older you strip away the things you don't have time for, and then you are left with only the things you have time for. Your life gets skinnier and skinnier until you wonder why you go on. You go on because there are things that must get done. You become no longer a person so much as a place, an unfunny place where things come to get done.

By going "ah" and "hah" they were able to lift the unrelenting pain of their dark, bestial days into something more recreational. It is only through the godly gift of humor that man endures the horror. What other faculty allows you to turn pain into triumph? Tears of sadness into tears of laughing too hard?

We want more than there is.