Quotes from Alex Shakar

She avoids deep thought like an empty restaurant, not out of stupidity, but a canny resolve to be happy.

Childhood and adulthood were not factors of age but states of mind.

With the Internet, we can choose the very communities we want to be a part of.

Cats are there to be indulged. That's their function: to receive the love we never fully gave our parents. Not like dogs. Dogs are there to give us the love and devotion our children will never fully give us.

That's the problem with relationships," George was saying. "It's a contract. You agree to be some unchanging caricature of yourself. To act the same way all the time. Never to change. It's counter-evolutionary. How can anything new and good come into your life, if you're holding on to something that doesn't exist anymore?

You need contradictions to make an ideal.

The only spot of comfort was the lingering impression of her fingertips through the fabric of his shirt, a reminder of the good side of having skin. He cultivated that square-inch patch, tilled and tended it into a full-body embrace.

Beauty is the PR campaign of the soul.

He dozed off, into a dreamless oblivion, for what seemed like seconds but was in fact hours, and awoke hungover, the inner surface of his skull pulsing like a single, giant nerve being chewed by some ruminant animal.

How easy it is for men to talk about beauty, and how subtly intimidating when they do.

Fred put away the phone, finished off his bourbon, and resumed watching the couple suck on the combined mass of their two tongues. He wasn't as drunk as them. Or as young. Or as stupid. He envied them on every score.

From the beauty they deserve will come the love they deserve. And from the love will follow truth.

On a cement pediment stands the inevitable bronze statue of a man in a cheap suit.

It's kind of a dark little life . . . being a paranoiac, but it's also not without its comforts.

What good was a truth that could be perceived only through delusion?

That a few fanatics had flown airplanes down into all of that seemed less surprising to him than that legions more hadn't yet done the same. Half the world or more was already setting itself against all the complexity in one way or another, going to off to live in caves or gated communities, dreaming of a world with one god, one book, a world small enough to feel that one wasn't lost in it.

She recalls the smell of bologna, the slimy, metallic taste of it on her tongue. Not for the first time she decides to become a vegetarian.

What's the paradessence of ice cream?

Our world exists only to hold up this other world, this ideal world. It's the world of our dreams, our desires. It's elaborate, it's heavy, and we carry it around with us everywhere. But we don't mind. The more that's up here, the better. Because up here is where we keep all that's best in us. The more that's up here, the richer our imagination becomes. . . . Products are the materials we use to build our world above the world.

Contradictions stop only the people who stop and think about them, who stop to question the consistency of their various desires instead of simply forging ahead and fulfilling them all.

From the beauty they deserve will come the love they deserve. And from the love will follow truth.