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. Sometimes it was for the best.

This was a simple exchange, labor for cash. It had nothing to do with gestures of kindness, or if you knew the other guy's name or not, or what mans' ultimate purpose on earth might be. What the market would bear--that was the only relevant question. (from the short story 'A Fair Price')

Layoffs were upon us. They had been rumored for months, but now it was official. If you were lucky, you could sue. If you were black, aged, female, Catholic, Jewish, gay, obese, or physically handicapped, at least you had grounds.

Where does this idea of greater connection come from? I've never in my life felt more disconnected. It's like how the rich get richer. The connected get more connected while the disconnected get more disconnected. No thanks, man, I can't do it. The world was a sufficient trial, Betsy, before Facebook.

Looking up from the blank page to the blinking clock, he discovered it was only three-fifteen. He decided that today was perhaps the longest day of his life. Not only had he been called an idiot to his face, but he could do nothing to counter that opinion, because

The rest of us would have liked some time off. They only gave us that Friday afternoon, which we took gladly, but we, too, suffered from stress and all sorts of disorders and would have liked more than an afternoon.

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.

The Pottery Barn and Rubber Soul had gotten old, but my ability to order more than the chicken fingers with honey mustard from T.G.I. Friday's would always provide me with a sense of accomplishment.

Our boredom was ongoing, a collective boredom, and it would never die because we would never die.

Everywhere we'd gone that day, bronze plaques kept popping up to mark some historical occasion. Here resistance fighters had dug a tunnel, here the dissidents had withstood the tanks. The whole city was like that: one giant monument to the heroes and martyrs. But what about those of us just trying to get by? I put on my sunglasses and stared out at the water.

Narcissism, justly lamented for doing so much damage, especially within the family unit, could also work miracles, as when a fundamentally apathetic collection of illiterates gets wind that they appear as characters in a book and transforms overnight into a bunch of rabbinical scholars.

I believe people think as a group more often than we might realize or care to admit. We like to believe that we act as individuals and nothing more, but time and again - in corporations and business, in politics and religion, in fashion and culture, and in friendships and social circles - we think and do as one.

I come from a very illustrious line of divorces. We love to get divorced in my family. My mother and father have been married four times each - eight ceremonies with the best of intentions.

One thing that I discovered about myself is I really don't like traveling. I feel like it's a terrible personal failing, but I was so satisfied to arrive at the conclusion.

After I left college I thought, very naively, that either you became someone interesting - an artist - or you went into academia. If you ended up in an office you were dull and lacking. And I ended up in an office.

If you can get by with quotes from The Godfather and nothing you say matters, that's pretty bleak, don't you think? Don't we want what we say to matter?

Everyone desires relationships and community. Most people want to belong to a cohesive, like-minded group. It staves off loneliness. It promotes identity. These are natural and very human instincts.

We had the great good fortune and shortcomings of character that marked every generation that had never seen war.

I have never stopped considering not becoming a writer.

Without work, so much of one's identity just evaporates.

We loved killing time and had perfected several ways of doing so. We wandered the hallways carrying papers that indicated some mission of business when in reality we were in search of free candy.

We're no longer dealing in the world of the real in a truthful way. We're interacting with each other in shiny homepages. I don't think that makes for honest communication.

Being serious is serious business in fiction. It's commercial or hoi polloi in fiction to be funny. It's too accessible to the great unwashed.