Quotes from Jess Walter

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

Whole worlds exist beneath the surface. And maybe you can't see down there, Michael thought, but there's a part of you that knows.

You don't really want my side of the story. You don't want to understand me, know me, to crawl inside of my head. You don't want to feel the things I've felt. You just want to know that one thing: why. Fine. Here's why: Her. I did it all for her.

Make them want to give you the thing you're taking.

My dreams tend to be either so obscure as to seem random, or so obviously connected to my subconscious that it's embarrassing- as if even my hidden depths lack depth.

Maybe it's ALWAYS the end of the world. Maybe you're alive for a while, and then you realize you're going to die, and that's such an insane thing to comprehend, you look around for answers and the only answer is that the world must die with you.

I think he came to believe it was better to choose your life, and that even choosing your death was better than letting someone else choose your life.

But it's not easy, realising how we fucked it all up. And that turns out to be the hardest thing to live with, not the regret or the fear, but the realisation that the edge is so close to where we live.

She was asleep, that blond hair swirled like butter on the pillow beneath her

With all due respect, sir," she said, "I do not believe justice will ever be truly possible, economic or otherwise, for any human being, until we have once and for all emancipated the vagina.

Rye wondered if loving another person was a trap—that eventually you had to either lose them or lose yourself.

erhaps it was the difference in age between the countries—America with its expansive youth, building all those drive-in movie theaters and cowboy restaurants; Italians living in endless contraction, in the artifacts of generations, in the bones of empires.

But aren't all great quests folly? El Dorado and the Fountain of Youth and the search for intelligent life in the cosmos-- we know what's out there. It's what isn't that truly compels us.

And I wonder if we don't live like water seeking a level a low bed until one day we just go dry. I wonder if a creek ever realizes it has made its own grave.

He flushed with sadness, as if every moment of his life were occurring all at once—his sister dying in childbirth, his mother squirming in that one-room flop, poor Danny sliding between wet logs, Gig in jail, and Jules dead—and how many more? All people, except this rich cream, living and scraping and fighting and dying, and for what, nothing, the cold millions with no chance in this world.

Use beautiful to describe a sandwich, and the word means nothing.

Your parents don't get to tell your story. Your sisters don't. When he's old enough, even Pat doesn't get to tell your story. I'm your husband and I don't even get to tell it. So I don't care how lovesick this director is, he doesn't tell it. ... No one gets to tell you what your life means! ~Alvis

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. Maybe every moment occurs at once, and they will always be twenty-two, their lives always before them.

A hole opened up and he had to know what was inside it. So he picked and picked until the hole was huge, and then everything sort of... fell in, him, his wife, his kid, and this fragile life they'd built at the edge of this hole. And that's why he was here, because he'd begun wondering if maybe his father hadn't fallen in the same hole -

At my age, you don't cry for the loss of old friends. You make a noise, "Ah," that is an expression of sorrow, but also of contentment that your friend lived a good life. It is, I suppose, the sound, too, of loneliness—here is yet another person I will never see again.

Listen," Richard says, "unless you're about to inherit some money, what we're talking about here is irreversible, fatal. You have fiscal Ebola, Matt. You are bleeding out through your nose and your mouth and your eye sockets, from your financial asshole." See! Fiscal Ebola? My financial asshole is bleeding? This was exactly why I started poetfolio.com; there are money poets everywhere.

Books that hadn't been cracked since they were shelved. Give money to a monkey and he'll fill his cage with bananas. Give the same money to a dim American and he'll build a show library every time.

Then we'll make a deal, you and me. We'll do and say exactly what we mean. And to hell with what anyone thinks about it. If we want to smoke, we'll smoke, if we want to swear, we'll swear. How does that sound?

Ideas are sphincters. Every asshole has one.