Quotes from A Fraction of the Whole

“Sometimes not talking is effortless, and other times it’s more exhausting than lifting pianos.”
― Steve Toltz, quote from A Fraction of the Whole

“I think that's the real loss of innocence: the first time you glimpse the boundaries that will limit your potential.”
― Steve Toltz, quote from A Fraction of the Whole

“Regrets came up and asked me if I’d like to own them. Declined them for the most part but took a few just so I wouldn’t leave this relationship empty handed.”
― Steve Toltz, quote from A Fraction of the Whole

“Or about how when you're a child, to stop you from following the crowd you're assaulted with the line "If everyone jumped off a bridge, would you?" but when you're an adult and to be different is suddenly a crime, people seem to be saying, "Hey. Everyone else is jumping off a bridge. Why aren't you?”
― Steve Toltz, quote from A Fraction of the Whole

“Sometimes I think the human animal doesn't really need food or water to survive, only gossip.”
― Steve Toltz, quote from A Fraction of the Whole

“As I passed through the gates, the blistered hands of nostalgia gave my heart a good squeeze and I realized you miss shit times as well as good times, because at the end of the day what you're really missing is just time itself. ”
― Steve Toltz, quote from A Fraction of the Whole

“The game is an analogy for life: there are not enough chairs or good times to go around, not enough food, not enough joy, nor beds nor jobs nor laughs nor friends nor smiles nor money nor clean air to breathe...and yet the music goes on.”
― Steve Toltz, quote from A Fraction of the Whole

“People carry their secrets in hidden places, not on their faces. They carry suffering on their faces. Also bitterness if there’s room.”
― Steve Toltz, quote from A Fraction of the Whole

“I didn't think anyone who had to demand respect ever got it.”
― Steve Toltz, quote from A Fraction of the Whole

“I couldn't think of anything other than her and the components of her. For example, her red hair. But was I so primitive I let myself be bewitched by hair? I mean, really. Hair! It's just hair! Everyone has it! She puts it up, she lets it down. So what? And why did all the other parts of her have me wheezing with delight? I mean, who hasn't got a back, or a belly, or armpits? This whole finicky obsession serves to humiliate me even as I write it, sure, but I suppose it isn't that abnormal. That's what first love is all about. What happens is you meet a love object and immediately a hole inside you starts aching, the hole that is always there but you don't notice until someone comes along, plugs it up, and then runs away with the plug.”
― Steve Toltz, quote from A Fraction of the Whole

“That's how we slide, and while we slide we blame the world's problems on colonialism, imperialism, capitalism, corporatism, stupid white men, and America, but there's no need to make a brand name of blame. Individual self-interest: that's the source of our descent, and it doesn't start in the boardrooms or the war rooms either. It starts in the home.”
― Steve Toltz, quote from A Fraction of the Whole

“[I'll teach you] how not to leave the windows of your heart open when it looks like rain and how everyone has a stump where something necessary was amputated. ”
― Steve Toltz, quote from A Fraction of the Whole

“You experience life alone, you can be as intimate with another as much as you like, but there has to be always a part of you and your existence that is incommunicable; you die alone, the experience is yours alone, you might have a dozen spectators who love you, but your isolation, from birth to death, is never fully penetrated.”
― Steve Toltz, quote from A Fraction of the Whole

“When you put so much effort to forget someone, the effort itself becomes a memory. Then you have to forget the forgetting, and that too is memorable.”
― Steve Toltz, quote from A Fraction of the Whole

“After all, memory may be the only thing on earth we can truly manipulate to serve us, so we don't have to look back at ourselves in the receding past and think, What an arsehole!”
― Steve Toltz, quote from A Fraction of the Whole

“The moment seemed endless, but it was probably only half that.”
― Steve Toltz, quote from A Fraction of the Whole

“Betrayal wears a lot of different hats. You don’t have to make a show of it like Brutus did, you don’t have to leave anything visible jutting from the base of your best friend’s spine, and afterward you can stand there straining your ears for hours, but you won’t hear a cock crow either. No, the most insidious betrayals are done merely by leaving the life jacket hanging in your closet while you lie to yourself that it’s probably not the drowning man’s size. That’s how we slide,
and while we slide we blame the world’s problems on colonialism, imperialism, capitalism, corporatism, stupid white men, and America, but there’s no need to make a brand name of blame. Individual self-interest: that’s the source of our descent, and it doesn’t start in the boardrooms or the war rooms either. It starts in the home.”
― Steve Toltz, quote from A Fraction of the Whole

“What a nasty act of cruelty, giving a dying man his last wish. Don't you realize he doesn't want it? His real wish is not to die.”
― Steve Toltz, quote from A Fraction of the Whole

“When we finished the kiss she said laughing, I can taste your loneliness - it tastes like vinegar. That annoyed me. Everyone knows loneliness tastes like cold potato soup.”
― Steve Toltz, quote from A Fraction of the Whole

“He pointed the gun at me. Then he looked up at my hand & tilted his head slightly.
- Journey, he said. I had forgotten I was still holding the book.
- Céline, I said back in a whisper.
- I love that book.
- I'm only halfway through.
- Have you got to the point where --
- Hey, kill me, but don't tell me the end!”
― Steve Toltz, quote from A Fraction of the Whole

“I was so happy I wanted to fold all the people into paper airplanes and fly them into the lidless eye of that big yellow moon.”
― Steve Toltz, quote from A Fraction of the Whole

“To have a child is to be impaled daily on the spike of responsibility.”
― Steve Toltz, quote from A Fraction of the Whole

“We were on our way to the twentieth floor, sharing the elevator with two suits that had men inside them.”
― Steve Toltz, quote from A Fraction of the Whole

“Those books of mine really got under their skin. Ironically, they thought I was inhuman because of the way I churned through library books.
How do you know how to pick them? Who tells you?' Daved asked me once.
I explained that there was a line. 'If you read Dostoyevsky, he mentions Pushkin, and so you go and read Pushkin and he mentions Dante, and so you go and read Dante and--'
All right!'
All books are in some way about other books.'
I get it!”
― Steve Toltz, quote from A Fraction of the Whole

“Let’s not mince words: the inside of the Sydney casino looks as if Vegas had an illegitimate child with Liberace’s underpants, and that child fell down a staircase and hit its head on the edge of a spade.”
― Steve Toltz, quote from A Fraction of the Whole

“I've been labelled many times - a criminal, an anarchist, a rebel, sometimes human garbage, but never a philosopher, which is a pity because that's what I am. I chose a life apart from the common flow, not only because the common flow makes me sick but because I question the logic of the flow, and not only that - I don't know if the flow exists! Why should I chain myself to the wheel when the wheel itself might be a construct, an invention, a common dream to enslave us?”
― Steve Toltz, quote from A Fraction of the Whole

“We're always sick and we just don't know it. What we mean by health is only when our constant physical deterioration is undetectable.”
― Steve Toltz, quote from A Fraction of the Whole

“There's nothing perplexing to me about a leafy shrub evolving out of the big bang, but that the post office exists because carbon exploded out of a supernova is a phenomenon so outrageous it makes my head twitch.”
― Steve Toltz, quote from A Fraction of the Whole

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