Quotes from Walter Kirn

Spirit was a by-product of activity, like the reflection from a spinning fan blade, and our souls in the end did not reside within us but flowed outward from our movements.

They lived in a blurry world, those two, where clear, consistent intentions weren't required.

His voice sounded more sincere in these surroundings, less distorted by pride and pain.

Our habit of wishing backward from what is to what might have been is the soft but persistent tapping that cracks the crystal.

This was all our world was made of: decomposed visions. Not atoms --- bits of dreams.

I'd forgotten this about women: so many conditions. A man shouldn't take them to heart, and yet he does, because he doesn't want to be alone.

Men who turn their faith into a business owe all of us a steak dinner now and then.

She was already dead, but we were starved for followers and stupefied by the elixir of our own heroism, and so we pretended words could resurrect her.

Meanness on request isn't meanness at all, but kindness carried too far.

The human body is strangely made and sometimes it pays not to think about it too closely.

epistemological

I know of no pleasure more reliable than consuming a great American brand against the backdrop featured in its advertising. Driving a Ford pickup down brown dirt roads. Swigging a Coke on the beach in Malibu. Flying Great West over central Colorado. It's a feeling of restfulness and order akin, I suspect, to how the ancient Egyptians felt watching the planets line up over the Pyramids. You're in the right place, you're running with the right forces, and if the wind should howl tomorrow, let it.

Journeys are fundamentally the same: they begin in the mind, with the image or the story that inspires them in the first place, and finish in the world.

If you've helped someone die, there is nothing I can tell you. If you haven't, I don't want to tell you. But I must, or what came later may make no sense.

Tasks . . . she'd been putting off, she suddenly dove into, such as talking to Joel about sex. Instead of teaching him as she'd taught me — with the help of college nursing texts that made the sexual organs look like plants — she use the new Penthouse .

Purple Noon.

The jurors appear vaguely stranded and at loose ends, uprooted from their routines and livelihoods.

Who were all these people, so many of them so brown? What was this ritual unfolding around him? I've never seen a German look as German as Clark did when he assessed his likely assessors. His eyes were like small blue coins behind his glasses.

One reason the Internet fosters conspiracy theories is that its system of branching, crossing tunnels is shaped like paranoid reasoning itself, and once inside the shadow maze you find yourself tracking elusive glimmers of light that recede as fast as you can follow them.

I sensed the presence of wizened bachelor potters working in sheds behind their mothers' houses.

Sometimes I wondered if my problem was liking too many different kinds of

people, including types that I didn't like much at all but felt I had something to learn or to gain from.

Clark was bulging with lies when I saw him two weeks later. They danced out of his mouth as though they'd been cooped up there and were glad for a chance to stretch their legs.

Stopping to think is fine for characters, but not for their creators. They have to work.