Quotes from Jess Walter

and he urges the old man to remember the last moment he felt his being without its relation to beloved Amedea, his last moment of individual happiness or longing—

This was the crazy thing about wealth: You only had it if you didn't use it, but if you didn't use it, there was no value in having it.

Some people wait forever, and only at the end of their lives do they realize that their life has happened while they were waiting for it to start." (P54)

the scramble to get higher, to be seen, the cycle of creation and rebellion, everyone assuming they were saying something new or doing something new, something profound—when the truth was that it had all been done a million billion times.

The first impression one gets of Michael Deane is of a man constructed of wax, or perhaps prematurely embalmed. After all these years, it may be impossible to trace the sequence of facials, spa treatments, mud baths, cosmetic procedures, lifts and staples, collagen implants, outpatient touch-ups, tannings, Botox injections, cyst and growth removals, and stem-cell injections that have caused a seventy-two-year-old man to have the face of a nine-year-old Filipino girl.

Words and emotions are simple currencies. If we inflate them, they lose their value, just like money. They begin to mean nothing. Use 'beautiful' to describe a sandwich and the word means nothing. Since the war, there is no more room for inflated language. Words and feelings are small now—clear and precise. Humble like dreams.

But Jules hated the missionaries and said cruelty and hope should never be served together.

I realized, as all survivors must, that being alive isn't the same thing as living.

He found himself inhabiting the vast, empty plateau where most people live, between boredom and contentment.

My cure for writer's block is to step away from the thing I'm stuck on, usually a novel, and write something totally different. Besides fiction, I write poetry, screenplays, essays and journalism. It's usually not the writing itself that I'm stuck on, but thing I'm trying to write. So I often have four or five things going at once.

I'm a writer, and the subject is less important than the act of writing itself.

I don't know a family that isn't touched by some sort of addiction.