Quotes from Jess Walter

This reminded him of Alvis Bender's contention that stories were like nations - Italy, a great epic poem, Britain, a thick novel, America, a brash motion picture in technicolor...

Yes, what is it like? Certainly not like she dreamed. But maybe that's okay. We want what we want. At home, she works herself into a frenzy worrying about what she isn't--and perhaps loses track of just where she is.

She saw death as just another wedding she wasn't invited to.

On any given day in Spokane, Washington, there are more adult men per capita riding children's BMX bikes than in any other city in the world.

And while his mother's lecture had gone over his seven-year-old head, Pasquale saw now what she meant--how much easier life would be if our intentions and our desires could always be aligned.

Weren't movies his generation's faith anyway--its true religion? Wasn't the theater our temple, the one place we enter separately but emerge from two hours later together, with the same experience, same guided emotions, same moral?...what was that but a religion?

And if a moment exists only in one's perception anyway, then perhaps the rush of feeling he has now is THE MOMENT, and not merely its shadow.

We want what we want—we love who we love.

It was odd and intimate, their hands connected, their heads in different rooms. They could talk. They could hold hands. But they couldn't see each other's faces.

These are the ruins of our memories, which loom in our minds like the Parthenon, even as they are decayed and weathered by time and regret.

Being alive isn't the same thing as living

I guess I forgot we were going out tonight. We always go out on Fridays. It's Thursday, Alvis. You are so tied to routine.

He was ready to stop trying to matter; he was ready to simply live.

If a police officer arrests a mime, does he need to tell him he has the right to remain silent.

Claire happy to no longer expect...but embrace the sweet lovely mess that is real life.

He was part of a ruined generation of young men coddled by their parents -by their mothers especially- raised on unearned self-esteem, in a bubble of overaffection, in a sad incubator of phony achievement.

Don't ever say that after sex, do you understand? If you feel the urge to say it, go see the girl first thing in the morning, with her night breath and no makeup...watch her on the toilet...listen to her with her friends...go meet her hairy mother and her shrill friends...and if you still feel the need to say such a stupid thing, then God help you.

How do you do it?" I asked her. "How do you keep getting up every day and fighting when winning seems impossible?" She thought about it, and then she said, "Men sometimes say to me: You might win the battle, Gurley, but you'll never win the war. But no one wins the war, Ryan. Not really. I mean, we're all going to die, right? "But to win a battle now and then? What more could you want?

the more you lived the more regret and longing you suffered, that life was a glorious catastrophe

Hell, it took only your first day in a Montana flop or standing over your mother's unmarked grave to know that equal was the one thing all men were not. A few lived like kings, and the rest hugged the dirt until it cracked open and took them home.

And he waited—as he always had—for life to come and find him.

I don't think you put the swear word in the right place, Grandpa," Teddy says. When Dad first came here, my boys would look shocked whenever Dad went Old-Faithful-profane, and I began to wonder if Lisa and I shouldn't swear more so Franklin and Teddy weren't so put off by curse words.

In the kitchen Valeria was making breakfast, his aunt never made breakfast even though Carlo insisted for years that a hotel hoping to cater to French and Americans must offer breakfast. "It's a lazy man's meal., she always said. What laggard expects to eat before doing any work?

And Pasquale forced himself to look away from her then. It was like prying a magnet off steel, but he did it: he turned forward in the boat, closed his eyes, still seeing her standing there in his memory. He shook with the strain of not looking back until they rounded the breakwater into the open sea and Pasquale exhaled, his head falling to his chest. You are a strange young man, Tomasso the Communist said.