Quotes from Sam Lipsyte

I knew I was in the vicinity of a serious lesson, if not about how to live life, then at least how to put some poetry into your craven retreat from it.

It was a big room with a shag carpet, antique lamps, a cabinet TV from days when entertainment lurked in the guise of furniture

How much I'd always envied the tight life of voles. The hidey hole was happiness.

I'm finding that the older I get, it's not that I learn new things, it's more like I find out how much of what I know is common knowledge.

Their pure hate was tainted now. We pine for avengers. We get bigots, thugs.

One night in the House of Drinking and Smoking we were victims of what I would later call a home invasion. I didn't know the term then. I think I learned it later, from a rap song, or a movie based loosely on a newspaper columnist's fear of a rap song.

We are spawn of woodland apes. No code has been undone. Neither faith nor reason will deliver us. We must look to the trees.

Kids must coddle their excitements. Soon enough the normies have you surrounded. It's all barricades, bullhorns. Come out, come out with your wonder abated.

You think everyone will stay behind and do everything you did all over again, forever. You picture old geezers in jean jackets doing whip-its behind the plaza.

It's hard to fuck your girlfriend when she's fucked up and you're not. It's harder than the skee-ball they used to have at the Plaza arcade, all that agony over a fuzzy piece.

I looked for Gary in all of the Gary places, but I was too early. These places were all haunted by the future of Gary.

I wanted to have friends from all over the world in the way of a man who has no friends.

The Brit's eyes had this pucker of awful witness.

His eyes had the ebb of his liver in them and he bore the air of a man who looks right at you and only sees the last of himself.

Van Wort was fat and his name was Van Wort. With that combination, why would you pack your kid off to camp? Let him play with ladybugs in the safety of his own lawn.

We are both from the same kind of towns. We both know the sound of swivel-head spray at midnight on a summer lawn. We both know the weak secrets of us.

Is this what Principal Fontana meant by the phrase 'well-rounded'? It's fucking spherical, Catamounts.

Why do you think posers pose? Because they want to be invited to the dominion of the real. And they know their very desire for it disqualifies them.

Is it too soon to say I love you?" "Yes. No." "Soonish I will say that I love you." "And in the meantime?" "I will merely love you.

Our friendship, for example, and how quickly we passed through each other, from fascinated strangers to loyal chums to relics of each other's world. We'd been pawns of proximity, choiceless as brothers.

A rich boy goes to college. He makes a lot of friends. They all think they are special and that they suffer in distinct ways, but they are all hurtling down the same world-historical funnel. They will attempt to professionalize their passions, or else just get jobs.

Good. Now. Let's talk our talk. Your beloved institution seems like it wants to step up to the next level. Be a culture player. Crank out all those smug nullities who can make the stylish, insipid, top-notch crap. Stuff we can jerk off to but that will also make us sorry, but not too sorry. Sexy sorry. Am I right?

I'm quite happy in my unhappy way. I'm more than satisfied to remain unsatisfied

It was a fucking suggestion. Do you think my world turns on your happiness? Your success? Do what you please. Just make sure you're alive to wipe my ass when I'm an invalid.... the way I told it to Gary later, it was a kind of liberation. Go forth, Daddy Miner was saying, be your own disappointment. There's a whole wide world to fail in.