Quotes from Joshua Ferris

Hank Nearly was an avid reader. He arrived early in his brown corduroy coat, with a book taken from the library, copied all the pages on the Xerox machine, and sat at his desk reading what looked passebly like the honest pages of business. He's make it through a three-hundred-page novel every two or three days.

If you hate the Yankees so much," Connie asked me, "why did you move to New York?" "To find out what kind of city could make a monster like a Yankees fan.

All broken hearts are circumstantial. Every lovelorn jerk is the victim of bad timing, good intentions, and someone else's poor decision making.

We suffered failures of imagination just like everyone else, our daring was wanting, and our daily contentment too nearly adequate for us to give it up.

My first job is to write a book that I believe is compelling and deserves the long sustained attention that any novel requires, and to worry about the commerce only late in the game.

You think I alienate myself from society? Of course I alienate myself from society. It's the only way I know of not being constantly reminded of all the ways I'm alienated from society.

The main questions of everyday life are too enormous to answer in any definitive sense.

Humor is a very big part of life, and if you exclude humor from your book, you're not capturing a very important part of human experience.

What separated the living from one another could be as impenetrable as whatever barrier separated the living from the dead.

I've always thought things were absurd. It would take a lot more effort for me to see things as reasonable.

We told him to get on with it. We liked wasting time, but almost nothing was more annoying than having our wasted time wasted on something not worth wasting it on.

We found ourselves wanting to hurry time along, which was not in the long run good for our health. Everybody was trapped in this contradiction but nobody ever dared to articulate it.

Every time you hear someone read your book and liked your book, you're never sure whether that's going to follow with a similar remark from someone else. Perhaps I have low expectations, but whenever I hear someone say, 'I liked your book,' I don't know if it's going to happen again.

We all knew there was a good deal of pointlessness to nearly all the meetings and in fact one meeting out of every three or four was nearly perfectly without gain or purpose but many meetings revealed the one thing that was necessary and so we attended them and afterward we thanked each other.

For all our penny-wisdom,'" he said, "'for all our soul-destroying slavery to habit, it is not to be doubted that all men have sublime thoughts.

We had any number of clocks surrounding us, and every one of them at one time or another exhibited a lively sense of humor.

I listened to Karen Woo give an explaination of photosynthesis once," he said. "God only knows why they were discussing photosynthesis.They hung on her every word, like she was a PBS special. Her explaination didn't even involve sunlight. These people will believe anything. They will say anything.

I had never thought much of genealogy. A lot of wasted time collecting the names of the dead. Then stringing those names, like skulls upon a wire, into an entirely private and thus irrelevant narrative, lacking any historical significance. The narcissistic pastime of nostalgic bores.

We had these sudden revelations that employment, the daily nine-to-five, was driving us far from our better selves.

If in large part we were concerned only with making it through another day without getting laid off, there was a smaller part just hoping to leave for the night without contributing to someone's lifetime of hurt.

she had the conviction of the newly converted, which wouldn't last forever, but would for the moment brook no discouragement or allow for second-guessing.

It happened all the time. Maybe someone had a legitimate gripe that deserved airing. Maybe someone had a compliment that shouldn't go unspoken. No one said a thing. So long and stay in touch, that's usually all we said. Take care of yourself, good luck. We said nothing about affection, appreciation, admiration.

I swore never to use the emoticon ever… until one day, offhandedly and without much thought, I used my first :) and, shortly thereafter, in spite of my initial resistance, :) became a regular staple of my daily correspondence

Freedom of religion in America is all fine and good until you start believing in nothing, and then it is a crime to be punished.' " "Is