Quotes from Joshua Ferris

Some people would never forget certain people, a few people would remember everyone, and most of us would mostly be forgotten.

Why not just go with it? Just walk the dog and send the tweets and eat the scones and play with the hamsters and ride the bicycles and watch the sunsets and stream the movies and never worry about any of it? I didn't know it could be that easy. I didn't know that until just now. That sounds good to me. I think I might be able to do that. Who couldn't do that? It would take somebody mentally ill not to do that, and I'm not mentally ill.

For a long time thereafter I stared almost steadily at the bright and ostentatious VERIZON sign on top of one of the tallest buildings—the only branded skyscraper in Manhattan, a fucking blight marring the skyline—and I thought, Why couldn't those cunts have flown into that building?

Without monstrous distortions, I was slowly learning, without lies and hypocrisy, one cannot have the idealized American life I so longed for. Perfection was marred only by those corruptions necessary to its enterprise.

Soon I was incorporating :( and ;) and ;( too and after that the live emoticons, and now, without any intention of ever reducing the enormity of my human emotions to these shallow shortcuts, to this typographical juvenilia, I went around all day reducing them and reducing them, endowing emotions with, and requiring them to carry the subtle quivering burdens of my inner life.

Benny's stories were more frequent in the days before the downturn, when we felt flush and secure. We were less mindful of being caught gathering. Then the downturn hit, our workload disappeared, and, though we had more time than ever to listen to Benny's stories, we were more conscious of being caught gathering, which was one indication that our workload had disappeared and that layoffs were necessary.

She no longer lived in a world of speculation or recall and would take nothing on faith when the facts were but a few clicks away. It drove me nuts. I was sick to death of having as my dinner companions Wikipedia, About.com, IMDb, the Zagat guide, Time out New York, a hundred Tumblrs, the New York Times, and People magazine. Was there not some strange forgotten pleasure in reveling in our ignorance? Couldn't we just be wrong?

night of limitless possibility expired, of a life forfeited, of a foreclosed

Our moral foundation is built on the fundamental law that God (if there is a God, which there is not) would not wish to be worshipped in the perverted and misconceived ways of human beings, with their righteous violence and prejudices and hypocrisies. Doubt, or cease being moral.

The announcement of a triple meeting could only mean that the project had been cancelled or postponed, or changed. We had ten minutes to ruminate on which was the worst fate. If canceled or postponed, our only project went away, and with it, all hope of looking busy. Looking busy was essential to our feeling vital to the agency, to mention nothing of being perceived as such by the partners, who would conclude by our labors that is was impossible to lay us off.

We'd seen firsthand how the man handled a crisis. If Marcia decided suddenly to brandish a stapler in a half-threatening manner, he'd fumble with his Motorola and forget his name.

Real life makes for good novels because it's lived as a bunch of lies, and because fictions of one kind or another are the only things worth living for.

All over America, in fact, people were up and out of their beds today in a continuing effort to polish turds. Sure, for the sake of survival, but more immediately for the sake of some sadistic manager or shit-brained client whose small imagination and numbingly dumb ideas were bleaching the world of all relevancy and hope.

The worst thing that could have happened to Icarus was not, in fact, his fiery end but his decision at the last second to go by Greyhound, and to start a nice family in Cleveland.

But I did like looking at her. It was harder now, knowing all the ways she sucked, but she was still gorgeous.

Catholics speak, like baseball players, in the coded language of gesture. Sure, the Roman Catholic Church is an abomination to man and a disgrace to God, but it comes with a highly structured Mass, several sacred pilgrimages, the oldest songs, the most impressive architecture, and a whole bunch of things to do whenever you enter the church. Taken all together, they make you one with your brother.

I don't know; I haven't heard from Uncle Stuart since the day we drove out to Brooklyn together to talk to Mirav Mendelsohn. I miss him, in a way. He meant so much more to me than I could ever mean to him. You don't get too many people like that. Roy Belisle and Bob Santacroce and Stuart Plotz- any one of them could have been something that was almost everything, if things had worked out just a little differently.

But enough daydreaming. Our desks were waiting, we had work to do. And work was everything. We liked to think it was family, it was God, it was following football on Sundays, it was shopping with the girls or a strong drink on Saturday night, that it was love, that it was sex, that it was keeping our eye on retirement. But at two in the afternoon with bills to pay and layoffs hovering over us, it was all about the work.

It wasn't as absurd a notion as it might sound. Some days, time passed way too slowly here, other days far too quickly, so that what happened in the morning could seem like eons ago while what took place six months earlier was as fresh in our minds as if an hour had yet to pass. It was only natural that on occasion we confused the two.

He kept his head down and slowly worked himself, word by word, back into communion with the other hours, days, years - there was in fact no name for this particular unit of time - that together formed a continuum of unawareness that was as close to transcendence ash e would come. He was working himself, as if with a spade in a tunnel that finally yields to light, out of the physical world.

It was my mom's doing. He would not have thought enough of himself to want anyone to have his name. Except when he was manic, when he probably would have happily named me Conrad Conrad Conrad.

Where was I when I lied? I mean the essential me, the self I knew and was proud of, the straight talker, advocate of truth and destroyer of illusions? Nowhere to be found.

Also found my posts on the Red Sox message boards. I got news for you, pal: I don't post dumb bullshit. Your impersonation attempts aren't going to fly. Everyone who knows me knows that when I post, I post gold. They also know that I don't give a damn about mystery cults, Sinai, or the Amalekites, fun as all that sounds.

I can't say for sure: at the first mention of the firmament, I start bleeding tears of terminal boredom. I grow restless. I flick ahead. It appears to go like this: firmament, superlong middle part, Jesus. You could spend half your life reading about the barren wives and the kindled wraths and all the rest of it before you got to the do-unto-others part, which as I understand it is the high-water mark.