Quotes from Adam Rapp

So I think I'm in love with Silent Starla, who isn't all that silent after all. In group she hardly ever talks, and in the cafeteria she just sort of stares off in this dreamy way. She's from Oak Park, Illinois, and when she left my room, she said, "We can go together, but I won't fuck you without a condom. I like your eyes.

The room I got is best described as being a glorified closet. It was like four times worse than what they gave you here at Burnstone Grove. The twin bed looked like some little kid had died on it. It was made up with these totally sad, urine-yellow sheets, a moth eaten comforter, and a pillow that was about as fluffy as a folded dishrag. The mattress was lumpy and smelled like pets and weather.

Above the desk there was this framed picture of Jesus. He was reaching his hand out and making this face like he was about to get shot.

Fifteen years ago I killed my sister.

To do it right, you need three people," he explained. "One to hold em' up. One to pocket the cash. And one to wait in the car. Like the Father, the Son and the Holy Ghost. Hang on a second," he said, cutting himself off. He pulled over to the side of the road, shifted into park, opened the door, leaned his head out and puked. It sounded like he was giving birth through his neck.

I'm convinced that her obsession with Jesus was far more romantic than spiritual. I think she was actually attracted to him. I sincerely thought that one day while out on a grocery run, she would find some skinny, bearded, out-of-work Foote guy on the side of the road and, convinced that he was our anorexic Son of God, rescue him and head for some unincorporated Christian town in the middle of Illinois with a bingo hall and lots of roadside crucifixes, never to return.

I pictured love as a big hairy giant with a dead fish in his mouth. Grizzly bear claws and his heart half out of his chest cause it's too big and the lungs have to fit. He never stops walking. Over mountains. Through the desert. On top of icy lakes. Past huge cities. And he hunts and kills for you and always comes back with plenty to eat.

I'm suddenly struck by the notion of how one becomes remote in one's own life.

10. You have to deal with stuff on your own and that's all there is to it.

I aint shot nobody yet, but I would. You never know who's gonna creep up behind you.

I asked her if she liked PJ Harvey and she said that she liked her old stuff mostly and that Uh Huh Her was pretty good too and then I tried not looking at her for a minute because she was starting to mad own my gaze like in a magnetic way and I didn't want to sweat her too much.

Listen to the sound inside.

I'm reaching toward something in a dark room. But I'm excited.

Infinite Jest isn't a book, it's a fucking planet.

I keep trying to get Matt here to cross back over into fiction, but he insists on slumming it in the theatre like some sort of third-class peasant.

Well whattaya know. Frogs love Harry Potter, too. There weren't even interested in one of the most celebrated new literary American novels of last year, but they get their panties in a knot for Harry Fucking Potter. That's so, I don't know, reverse xenophobic.

With playwriting, there's a lot of false starts. Ill-fated first acts, etcetera. I blame it all on Shakespeare. He stole all my ideas like three hundred years before I was even born. He futuristically ruined my career.

Leave us alone without books and we shall be lost and in confusion at once.

Sylvia Plath, John Berryman, Virginia Woolf, David Foster Wallace, Seneca, Hunter S. Thompson, Ernest Hemingway, William Inge, Anne Sexton, Hart Crane, Yukio Mishima, and John Kennedy Toole.

I would hope that the staffs at juvenile detention centers and reform schools are carefully chosen so that there is a community of support and hope.

When you're poor, you don't want anyone to know you're poor.

I guess I'm just afraid of whats going to happen. Because you can't run forever. There's only so much pavement that the road makers lay down. After a while, the highway quits going north and it just turns into sky. And you can't go anywhere in the sky unless you have a plane or some kind of rocket.

I don't mind him not talking so much, because you can hear his voice in your heart; the same way you can hear a song in your head even if there isn't a radio playing; the same way you can hear those blackbirds flying when they're not in the sky

It was at that moment that I came to the conclusion that there is some link between plants and loneliness.