Quotes from Rachel Kushner

Floyd and Lloyd, his uncles by marriage, never spoke to each other. They were men of zero words to anyone, ever. They were men who lay watching TV, making women and children feel skittish and in trouble for existing.

It makes you feel good about yourself, especially in the beginning. It makes you feel good about other people. You want to give the whole world a break, a time-out, a tender regard. There

What happens between bodies during an insurrection is more interesting than the insurrection itself.

No person lives in the future. The present, the present, the present. Life keeps on being that.

Whimsy is the answer to tears.

It wasn't a hoax,' Burdmoore said quickly. 'It was theater. Real theater. Like Brecht.' ¶ 'What does Brecht have to do with it? I think you should leave Brecht out of this--

The cause of whose tears... could not be found in the traces on her cheeks. ...even as he knew the source of her tears was endless. bottomless and endless and not to be found in their traces. p.194

Figs plopped on the hood like soft leather pouches.

We loved life more than the future.

What occurred did so because I was open to it, and not because fate and I met at a certain angle. I had plenty of time to think about this later. I thought about it so much that the events of that evening sometimes ran along under my mood like a secret river, in the way that all buried truths rushed along quietly in some hidden place. P.49

I remember a rainbow spectrum of men's wing tips parked in rows, triple-A narrow, the leather dyed snake green, lemon yellow, and unstable shades of vermilion and Ditto-ink blue. All of humanity dresses in uniforms of one sort or another, and these shoes were for pimps.

the point of the film....was about being a woman, about caring an not caring what happens to you. it was about not really caring. p.198

Ski racing was drawing in time, I said to Sandro. I finally had someone listening who wanted to understand: the two things I loved were drawing and speed, and in skiing I had combined them. It was drawing in order to win.

Through the familiar orbit east of Reno, the brothels and wrecking yards, the big puffing power plant and its cat's cradle of coils and springs and fencing, an occasional freight train and the meandering and summer-shallow Truckee River, railroad tracks and river escorting me to Fernley, where they both cut north.

I come from reckless, unsentimental people.

pretending as they waited that time had no value and what a lie. A lie they didn't mind. They were on the clock, being paid to forsake time's value by standing under the sun like they had all day.

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,

was one of those. If you follow their rules, they make more rules. You have to fight people or you end up with nothing.

change was such an elusive thing. A man could say every day that he wanted to change his life, was going to change it, and every day the lament became merely a part of the life he was already living, so that the esire for change was in fact a kind of stasis that allowed the unchanged life to continue, because at least the man knew to disapprove of it, which reassured him not all was lost.

On that day, nothing could have seemed more romantic to me, no other scenario more like real courtship, than a Chinese movie and a hand job under a coat.

If you stayed there, sooner or later you were going to be visited at night by Russ, who was old, and muscular, and mean. The girls complained about being raped by him as if it were a form of strictness, or rent. They were willing to endure it because they didn't have other options. The rest of us did nothing about it because Russ bought us liquor and what were we to do, call the police? One of them was known for taking girls out to Point Lobos instead of to the police station.

change was such an elusive thing. A man could say every day that he wanted to change his life, was going to change it, and every day the lament became merely a part of the life he was already living, so that the desire for change was in fact a kind of stasis that allowed the unchanged life to continue, because at least the man knew to disapprove of it, which reassured him not all was lost.

I tried to explain this to Nadine, but she kept interrupting me.

When the police came to San Lorenzo they were fired upon by children and grandmothers with rocks, buckets of water, rotten eggs. There was more of the proletarian shopping, as it was called, that I'd seen on the Via del Corso. Jeans for the people. Cheese and bread and wine for the people. Umbrellas for the people, because rain fell and fell that week.