Quotes from Norman Rush

Literature is humanity talking to itself.

I wanted to incorporate everything, understand everything, because time is cruel and nothing stays the same.

I must love big novels, because that's what I've written. It takes a while before you begin to breathe the air the characters breathe.

A thing that corrupts N's worldview is his own demonic energy, which is what socalled greatness may in fact reduce to. He's unnatural. He can work six hours flagstoning or paving, scabs of cement stuck all over his body, a bite to eat, into the bathing engine, and he's all set to work late into the night reading and writing and using his abacus.

But then I thought: you left to leave. Staying in his ambience like this is stupid and it is lacerative.

A utopia I would join in a minute is a society which could be communist or capitalist, anything, except that no woman member of it ever underwent sex unless she was hot. Pretending to be hot bears a distinct resemblance to self-rape, but it's a rape accompanied by boredom instead of fear.

It takes a while before you begin to breathe the air the characters breathe.

I think the falls represented death for the taking, but a particular death, one that would be quick but also make you part of something magnificent and eternal, an eternal mechanism. This was not in the same league as throwing yourself under some filthy bus.

I think it was Denoon who said that the closest you can come in life to experiencing free will is when you do things at random. There is no free will. Everything is still determined when you make random choices, but you stop noticing.

It was safe to talk to yourself because of the roar you were subsumed in, besides being alone. I fragmented. One sense I had was that I was going to die sometime anyway. Another was that the falls were something you could never apply the term fake or stupid to. This has to be animism, was another feeling.

Literature is humanity talking to itself.

The main effort of arranging your life should be to progressively reduce the amount of time required to decently maintain yourself so that you can have all the time you want for reading.

It was a standard fantasy when you fell in love to imagine you could go back in time and find your beloved growing up, appear there, save him or her, get together as adolescents, by magic, and go on together, fighting for one another, into old age, never wavering.

Small breasts are best for the long haul.

Very goodlooking people are as a rule more forgetful than the median. Their mothers start it and the world at large continues it, handing them things, picking things up for them, smoothing their vicinity out for them in every way. I on the other hand remember everything.

The characters write the plot. Their natures do.

There is no permanent friendship between men, among men. Something goes wrong, somebody marries the wrong person, somebody advances too fast, somebody converts, somebody refuses good advice or bad advice, it didn't matter. It went up in a flash.

One thing you distinctly never want to hear a man you're interested in say softly is that his favorite book in the whole world is The Golden Notebook. Here you are dealing with a liar from the black lagoon and it's time to start feeling in your purse for carfare.

Nina said, "Have regular facial expressions." That was a command from their inventory of facetious devices they used to josh one another out of bad moods.

You could be the first nation to tell your children to ask themselves what work in the world would most become their souls and to prepare to do it.

Causing active ongoing pleasure in your mate is something people tend to restrict to the sexual realm or getting attractive food on the table on time, but keeping permanent intimate comedy going is more important than any other one thing.

In love and mating, ambience is central.

Now everything was going to be impossible, but better.

And the question was still there of whether their true interior selves—the subtle bodies inside—were still there and functioning despite what age and accident and force of circumstance may have done to hurt them. He meant something like that Ã¢â'¬Â¦ that when they had become friends it had been a friendship established between subtle bodies, by which he meant the ingredients of what they were to be Ã¢â'¬Â¦