Quotes from Sam Lipsyte

They sought each other, missed each other, at cocktail parties, in train terminals, at flower shops, their fin de siecle Nokias gaining symbolic power with each scene.

Now Rich walks in, a silver pin stuck in his lapel, his hair slicked back in the style of men who seem to be saying, Hey, go blow, my hair is slicked back, and on weekends I know joy.

I used to think I had integrity but I came to realize it was just sloth.

Some nights," I said, "I picture myself naked, covered in napalm, running down the street. But then it's not napalm. It's apple butter. And it's not a street. It's my mother.

We are going to eat ice cream and we are going to eat shit. The trick is to use different spoons.

Shudder, in fact, is not quite the word for the feeling. Feeling is not quite the word for the feeling. How's bathing at knifepoint in the phlegm of the dead? Is that a feeling?

I'm a citizen of the republic of empathy.

I bought an energy bar, and as I ate it a great weariness came over me.

Everything's weird if you stare at it.

Judging by your face, the what-the-fuck nodes in your cerebral cortex must be a real light show.

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.

I'd become one of those mistakes you sometimes find in an office, a not unpleasant but mostly unproductive presence bobbing along on the energy tides of others, a walking reminder of somebody's error in judgement.

You can't go walking through Mordor in naught but your skin.

I was glad I'd remembered to shucksify my vocabulary in the company of children.

This country was built on the backs of dudes who drank on buses. What we do honors them.

You think you know yourself, the world. You believe you've got a bead on everybody else's bullshit, but what about your own?

You pay a whore to make you feel like a man, you fund a philharmonic to make yourself feel like a refined man.

I felt as though I were snorting cocaine, or rappelling down a cliffside, or cliffsurfing off a cliff of pure cocaine.

They weren't like dolls, because dolls had no feelings. Kids had feelings, just not any remotely related to yours.

You're growing up. All you need to remember is that nothing changes. New technology, new markets, global interconnectivity, doesn't matter. It's still the rulers and the ruled. The fleecers and the fleeced." "Which are you?" "I'm a piece of expensive equipment. You, too. Maybe not so expensive. [...]

Yes, we could solve for why, but we could also eat another slice of coconut cake.

It was early, late, lockjaw hour.

We'd been walking in endless rectangles and now we were near the candy store again. The lights were out, the security gate down. We leaned up against the wall of a bank and I could feel the cool stone on my back, the billions of dollars thrumming through wires beneath and behind me, or on the night waves above. I wasn't quite sure how they traveled. Or how much they got out anymore.

She liked reality shows the best, and then the shows that purported to be about reality.