Quotes from Rachel Kushner

Looking at someone who is looking at you was a drug as strong as any other.

Another sign, NO TANK TOPS. Under it, typically, an entire three-generation family, all in tank tops, flesh spilling. And what was it about shoulders? What was law enforcement's fear of shoulders?

Sometimes they just sit. Sometimes one turns on a radio and they listen to music, or to the news, but they don't care about the actual news, just that the radio is issuing a steadyish sound whose particulars they do not have to follow to understand what the radio is actually telling them: life is being lived. No need to be a part of it as long as you know it's streaming.

Certain women in jail and prison make rules for everyone else, and the woman insisting on quiet was one of those. If you follow their rules, they make more rules. You have to fight people or you end up with nothing.

The thing suppressed as an intrusion," Eric said, "is almost always worth looking at.

The mind is off duty but the body is open.

The VW doesn't make you think of Hitler and genocide. It's a breast on wheels, a puffy little dream.

It was good to be a stranger in Los Angeles. It was bad to be a stranger in Los Angeles with the company of another stranger in a loud shirt.

I can only know myself, if I can know anyone. I can only judge me.

people only tend to allow their own contradictions, and not those of others. It was okay to be murky to yourself, to know you weren't an angel, but other people had to be more cleanly divided into good and bad. P.357

And if someone did remember them, someone besides me, that person's account would make them less real, because my memory of them would have to be corrected by facts, which are never considerate of what makes an impression, what stays in the mind after all these years, the very real images that grip me from the erased past and won't let go.

What happens slowly carries in each part the possibility of returning to what came before. In an accident everything is simultaneous, sudden, irreversible. It means this: no going back.

God was ejected when we traveled from the closed world to the infinite universe. We were also ejected.

Yes, I need the money. I mean no, I don't. It can't be reduced to money. I can't explain why I do it. It's a kind of impulse.

I was a kid. I didn't know about love, that you see someone and whether or not they say much, they make the world suddenly different, a mysterious and more alive place that you can access only through them. And the new, better world falls lifeless and flat when they go away.

The woman senses that time is more purely hers if she squanders it and keeps it empty, holds it, feels it pass by, and resists filling it with anything that might put some too-useful dent in its open, airy emptiness.

A funny thing about women and machines: the combination made men curious.

I feel like my mind is a sweater.And a loose thread get's tugged at, pulled and pulled until the sweater unravels and there's only a big fluffy pile of yarn. you can make something with that with it, that pile of yarn, but it will never be a sweater again. that's the state of things p.91

You have time. Meaning don't use it, but pass through time in patience, waiting for something to come. Prepare for its arrival. Don't rush to meet it. Be a conduit.

I was not likely to join a cult. That was not the danger I felt in glimpsing the feet of the dead, the bucket from which they drank. It was the proven fact, in the photographed feet, that you could drink death and join it.

Whatever she was or wasn't, she looked like a liar and he liked liars.

I trusted the need for risk, the importance of honoring it.

If your parents died suddenly, Sandro understood, your home was wherever you were, and now you were from nowhere. Your parents were your provenance. Dead, you had no provenance.

All you can do is involve yourself totally in your own life, your own moment, Lonzi said.