Quotes from Norman Rush

He was mixing up friendship with acts and atmospheres from the deluded matrix the boys had lived in for a heartbeat in the seventies. She thought, I am your friend, you idiot, and I let you into my perfect body, for Christ's sake.

What a datum! I couldn't help thinking over and over.

This might be good, I thought as I studied the crowd. There were several definitely intelligen?t guys present, not strobe-lig?ht intellects but people who could make you uncomforta?ble in a debate if you got too much beyond what you absolutely had the facts on.

Ah good, I thought, another thesis topic although unfortunately not in my field, id est proving that women are almost invariably the appeasers when fights occur that lead to stalemates

said Let's just regard the whole episode as overdetermined and forget it. This worked out to be a genius thing to say, evidently. He was relieved. We held hands across the table.

He would say only slightly facetiously that 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.

One attractive thing about me is that I'm never bored, because during any caesura my personal automatic pastime of questioning my own motives is there for me.

What I was suddenly afraid of was our perihelion, the closest we would ever approach or be, and that everything after this would transpire between bodies farther apart. I was thinking that if you looked back over the trajectory of every mating once it was over, there would be an identifiable perihelion.

This shooting star had apparently been sedentarized in my bailiwick-so, good.

An alcoholic promising not to drink again is roughly like anyone promising never to fart again

People who had children assuming they were creating future friends were rolling the dice.