Quotes from Matthew Norman

giant hard drive in my head, so I'm forced to obsess over it all like

In my career, I've found that only annoying people knock on open doors.

I'm not an alcoholic—I don't have the discipline to become one—

There's a line in one of my dad's novels about the most beautiful parts of the female anatomy being the ones that are the most innocent—the ones that have never been scandalized by nudity.

For the first thirty-something years of my life, I never once asked my dad if he was OK . . . and now I've done it twice in one week. I wonder if this is just the way it is. Are all our parents, collectively, fucked up? Have they always been fucked up, and it just takes us until our own adulthood to figure that out?

Gary has made the classic mistake of equating precise cheekbones, perfect breasts, and a vague association with philanthropy as the signs of a good woman.

I'm leaning on an old guy trick here, claiming my wife is being a typical irrational woman right as she begins saying things that I don't want to hear.

You ever notice that like seventy-five percent of the dudes in America look like the bad guy in The Karate Kid?" I say. "Don't

I realize how utterly amazing it is that we're all able as humans to go about our daily lives without constantly obsessing over the fact that each of us will almost certainly be in a sterile bed someday, medicated and slowly dying. This officially marks the most depressing thing that has ever crossed my mind.

What would it be like to be lying there listening to your family parceling out a bunch of things you cared enough about to keep for your whole life? There's

If she wasn't pretty enough for them, fine, because they weren't worth her time anyway. They didn't make her happy. None of them were good people. None of them were nice.

We hold on to the shitty things the tightest, for some reason. And this is the shittiest thing ever. "Are

Actually, the first time I saw one in real life, I thought of the Great Pit of Carkoon in Return of the Jedi." "OK

I'm not an alcoholic—I don't have the discipline to become one—but

Eating with children at a restaurant is like eating with a live grenade. It's going to explode every time. You just don't know when.

The lesson here... Sometimes people throw things away. That doesn't mean those things aren't really, really good. Most of the time, it just means that person didn't know what they had.

Maybe this is how Catholics do it. We accept a certain level of unhappiness—like we have an unhappiness equilibrium built into our brains—and then, one day, we drop dead.

I suspect scotch is something you have to convince yourself to enjoy, like sushi or the last few Radiohead albums, but I can't deny the result is nice. "You

You ever wonder if it's really not more complicated than that?" I ask. "That maybe everyone else is right, and people like you and me just need to quit looking for stuff to be depressed about?" She looks up, and then back at her dirt, dismissing this stupidity without comment. When

Mixed in with all of its silly bullshit, Facebook is the literal manifestation of all our regrets, looping and looping, for free, on our computers and phones. People who should be gone and safely out of our lives forever are there again, one cryptic little glimpse at a time, reminding us of all the things we should or shouldn't have done. Then

We're all damaged. Every single beautiful, stupid, precious one of us.

Never trust someone who isn't miserable at least half of the time. That's my motto.

Billy is all for the subtle use of profanity, but too much just seems excessive, like saxophone solos in rock songs.

I have to go back home for a while." "Ohio?" "Omaha." "Right. Omaha. Why?