Quotes from David Rakoff

I am the furthest thing from a do-gooder. I am venal and flib and too clever by half, I know, but the thrill of the most brilliantly quicksilver aperÒ«u is no match for the self-interested high I get from having done someone a good turn. You'd think I'd do more good turns as a result, but there you go.

The best=laid plans, one's most fastidious contingency strategies have revealed themselves in the cold light of day to be laughably inadequate, no match for the happenstance that seems of late only to promise death, mayhem, poverty, flood. And here you are, having spent all that time protecting your home from the oncoming elements only to find that it has been shored up with crackers.

Hoped if she kept the dream hidden and frozen She soon would forget that she'd never been chosen. But dreams screams as loud whether thriving or dying And Helen despite herself never stopped trying.

No secrets, no longing, no desperate hoping Just reach out and grab from a world cracked open.

The overriding sense of Tokyo...is that it is a city devoted to the new, sped up in a subtle but profound way: a postmodern science-fiction story set ten minutes in the future.

So what can we learn from their watery ends? Is there some lesson on how to be friends? I think what it means is that central to living, a life that is good is a life that's forgiving. We're creatures of contact. Regardless of whether we kiss or we wound, still we must come together. Though it may spell destruction, we still ask for more, since it beats staying dry, but so lonely on shore. So we make ourselves open, while knowing full well it's essentially saying, please, come pierce my shell.

I didn't always write for a living, and even back when it was my most fondly held dream to one day be able to do so, writing was difficult. Writing is like pulling teeth. From my dick.

It must be murder to be an aging beauty, a former Tadzio, to see your future as an ignored spectator rushing up to meet you like the hard pavement. What a small sip of gall to be able to time with each passing year the ever-shorter interval in which someone's eyes focus upon you. And then shift away.

In my brief glimpse of what is to come I realize how little I care to witness it. I have seen the future and I'm fairly relieved to say, it looks nothing like me.

The collective delusion here is overwhelming narcissism posing as altruism.

I come by my alarmism honestly. I have learned this custom over the years as I have settled into being a true New Yorker. This is how we welcome foreigners to our shores. Because we are so often frightened by living here, we are annoyed and offended when visitors fail to show the proper signs of terror. So we try to scare the living daylights out of them.

But if one's dreams having to come true was the only referendum on whether they were beautiful, or worth dreaming, well then, no one would wish for anything. And that would be so much sadder.

It seems frankly remarkable that anyone anywhere ever attempted anything.

We have become an army of multiply chemically sensitive, high-maintenance princesses trying to make our way through a world full of irksome peas.

Details can change or go missing entirely, particularly in moments of physical peril. A kind of amnesia goes hand in hand with sickness, and a good thing, too.

Childrens ilogic can be an exquisitely structured mistake.

I had a tumor. But it was great.

But thanks to my rapidly dividing cells, I no longer have that feeling—although I remember it very well—that if I just buckled down to the great work at hand, lived more authentically, stopped procrastinating, cut out sugar, then my best self was just there right around the corner. Yeah, no. I'm done with all that. I

There will be peaks of great joy from which to crow and vales of tears out of which to climb. When and why they will happen, no one can say, but they will happen. To all of us. We will all go back and forth from one to the other countless times during a lifetime. This is not some call to bipartisanship between inimical sides. The Happy and the Sad are the same population.

Why not be a communist, she thinks, if it means that kind of belonging?

What remains of your past if you didn't allow yourself to feel it when it happened? If you don't have your experiences in the moment, if you gloss over them with jokes or zoom past them, you end up with curiously dispassionate memories. Procedural and depopulated. It's as if a neutron bomb went off and all you're left with are hospital corridors, where you're scanning the walls for familiar photographs.

Without the work, there is nothing.

The man beside me, apropos of nothing, raises his hand and says that there is 'a story' that man started society because he was 'cast out of a garden because of a sin.' He doesn't attribute this anecdote, leaving it a blind item from a source we might not know. He seems nice enough but potentially dangerous.

Here's the second joke: Two psychiatrists meet on the street and say hello. "How are you?" asks one. "Eh, not so good," says the other. "I had a stupid misunderstanding, a slip of the tongue. I was visiting my mother out at the old folks' home. We were having lunch and I asked her to pass me the salt, but instead I said, 'You fucking bitch you ruined my life.