Quotes from Joe Meno

the city is just too big and too full of people to be alone.

Without death, there is hardly any threat strong enough to truly appreciate human life. He thinks: I am as good as dead--too afraid to live, only waiting, never taking a risk--I am as good as dead already.

But why? Why did you do the evil things you did?' Billy asks suddenly. 'Ah, because I could not imagine consequences,' the Professor says. 'To do harm, to live through evil, is to align oneself with chaos. Now it is the same chaos which is slowly destroying me.

As the liquid paper's fumes quell his brain activity, Jack finds himself staring at her again and what he thinks is this: Wow.

You scan the cheering bleachers for the strange boy's face: handsome, reserved, with the eye patch, a little dramatic, a little scary. You finally find him sitting there in the middle of the sixth row. He is wearing a dark green army jacket and is staring back at you. He looks sad and beautiful, like a watercolor in a hospital room.

Maybe. Because he's got to try. Because she is too interesting, too beautiful not to even do anything.

It would always be a put-on, high school or not, for the whole rest of the world, for the rest of our lives. You couldn't ever guess who someone was by the way they looked because, good or bad, the way they looked was always just a costume or an act. It was Halloween everyday, for most people anyway, just to feel like they weren't alone, to belong, just to keep being happy maybe.

It is no parlor trick: There is a skull and, in the dark, it is glowing. Somehow it is now floating above us all. Listen: The skull is speaking. It is saying your name. It knows about you and your favorite flower and all about your tenth birthday. But it does not matter. You are not convinced. For some reason, you are still full of doubt. You stare into the dark, looking for wires. Grasping for strings, you hold your hands out.

And it's exactly what's wrong with the radio. It's like...anything that tries to appeal to everybody always ends up sounding so cheap.

Please let there be a heaven for everything that is too pitiful to believe.

As a boy, all I ever wanted was this: a life dedicated to art; every idea, every breath an artistic gesture. And here is this girl before me, blowing on her hands to keep warm. And why am I so worried it's not going to last?

He wants to say: First of all, you were wrong about pop music. And art and all of pop culture. And all kinds of things. Because all of it matters. Even if it is awful. Everybody knows all the bad movies and the bad songs on the radio. Because it's the only thing anybody has in common anymore. It's all anybody has. So you were wrong about that and you were wrong about us and you were wrong about me, but he doesn't actually say any of this out loud.

Maybe, he thinks, as he's riding on through the snow, maybe this is why she's leaving. Maybe she fell in love with me when we were kids. And now: and now: and now: we're not kids anymore.

wondered about what he said and then thought hard. I could never be a dick, not to Gretchen anyway, so I guess I was doomed; doomed to go for this girl that didn't go for me. But that was OK as I long as I did everything I could.

And he says, "I'm trying to figure out what's wrong with me. And I think I realized that I'm average, that there's nothing remarkable about me. And I wanted to know if this is something other people think about.

The world of evil is only as evil as we allow it to be.

Our worlds are so momentary. We are along all our lives and then go off that way as well.

C. On that cloudless Saturday morning, Madeline wakes up and sees Jonathan lying beside her, then decides that she's probably going to end up loving him forever.

Kristin nods, marching ahead of Clark, who gazes as the impossible smallness of Kristin's ankles and feet. Years later, while imprisoned for drug charges, he will think of those tiny feet and know he is forever doomed for having lied to her, for having harmed something so delicate, so defenseless, so small, so weak.

I really do. It's the first time I don't have to think at work, you know. It's really simple. You just answer the phone and put in people's orders. It's pretty laid back. You don't like it?" "No. I feel like it's killing my brain." "Maybe that's why I like it. I don't mind not having to think.

Listen, I'm going to give you some advice, not because I think you need it, but because I feel like I've earned it. The right, I mean. To give advice. Here it is: don't hold onto things. It's a problem the men in my family have. It's taken me a long time to figure this out. Me, my father, my grandfather, we collect things. We collect miseries. It's what we do. But sometimes the best thing to do is to just let things go. To let them pass.

I was just going to stand here and watch it happen. I wasn't going to say a fucking thing. Why? Because what did it matter? What did any of it matter?

What lasts? What lasts? What lasts? What lasts? What lasts? And so he stares for an hour or so at all her notes, at the poorly sketched drawings for an art movement that has now come to an end, and realizes how there are all these moments, moments just like this one, there are all these moments, and how everyone lives their lives in these short, all-too-short moments. There are all these moments and what's so interesting, what makes them beautiful, is the fact that none of them last.

Go to a goddamn priest if you wanna be lied to. I've seen too many of your kind slip back inside to fool myself. If you wanna think you're a new man, hell, that's fine. But don't think you're looking any different in anyone else's mind.