Quotes from Walter Kirn

We were all journalists, professional truth-seekers, but one thing we knew about the truth that laymen were prone to disregard was that it need not be literal or factual; the unpredictable human personality was itself a fact.

Leslie Titmuss bothered me. His name, it made me want to sneeze. I also thought I recognized it. I typed it into my laptop, a procedure that had lately held far too much suspense for me. Among the top results the search returned was a page from GoodReads, a literary website.

bobbybaird i'm a writer, so are you. we try to compose our thoughts and words for effect as well as sense. vain of us? a bit.

Given Loughner's obsession with meaninglessness and language, maybe Foucault & Derrida deserve some fault here, too.

T]he anti-vitriol vitriol is getting ugly.

Is it possible to be wiser on the page than you are in life? I'm hoping so.

You thought you were found but you realize that you were lost, and someday you may discover that you're lost now.

Something about the structure of my brain, its associative, porous, open-endedness, was defenseless against the ever-enlarging Web. Every video, news story, photo, email, stock chart, sexy picture, and five-day weather forecast was an enticement to step into the forest, and once I was two or three bread crumbs down the path, the witches had me, I was in their oven.

truth from him, is a swan dive through a mirror into a whirlpool.

endless soaring toy-rocket dreams and schemes that let out a sad, weak 'pop' at their high climax point and then flake apart as they tumble toward some thorn patch that's also a hatching ground for baby snakes

Requesting permission from someone to be honest is really a way of accusing the other person of being so demanding or overbearing that you couldn't be honest all along.

I feel like my head is finally the right size. I feel like it finally fits around my mind.

It looked like just the sort of family Americans dream of having: dumb and loving.

Our faith was a flickering flame.

They were gray, staring, bottomless, blank, fallen eyes whose pupils played scenes of heaven upside down.

Quiet cunning bested boastful brawn

Behind the building rose towering, aged pine trees whose shadows fell crabbed and arthritic across the lawn. The lawn was expansive and in good, green shape. It offered contrast. It was like a fresh haircut on a drunken tramp.

I sensed that almost all of them knew they didn't have much more time on earth. Maybe this accounted for their willingness to pitch in with strangers and form a neighborhood.

Other people's devotions embarrassed me, perhaps because, like other people's kisses, they rarely looked genuine when viewed too closely.

Their throat muscles shifted sharply when they spoke, as if separately manufacturing each word.

Reliving his degradation had struck some spark in him and it was glowing now like a blown-on coal.

He looked like a being who'd voyaged back through time from a world that had overcome illness, pain, and conflict.

I just wasn't ready for his stories. They'd breed with the others I'd heard and hatch new monsters, because there was no such thing as separation here, not once you'd started listening. Never listen.

I preferred that my bad dreams be vague.