Rant

We'll never be as young as we are tonight.

In a world where billions believe their deity conceived a mortal child with a virgin human, it's stunning how little imagination most people display.

The future you have, tomorrow, won't be the same future you had, yesterday.

Life's greatest comfort is being able to look over your shoulder and see people worse off, waiting in line behind you.

What if reality is nothing but some disease?

Rant would tell people: 'You're a different human being to everybody you meet.

By the time you read this, you'll be older than you remember.

You grow up to become living proof of your parents' limitations. Their less-than masterpiece.

Some people are just born human, the rest of us, we take a lifetime to get there.

The big reason why folks leave a small town,' Rant used to say, 'is so they can moon over the idea of going back. And the reason they stay put is so they can moon about getting out.' Rant meant that no one is happy, anywhere.

We all have this moment, when your folks first see you as someone not growing up to be them.

Mylife might be little and boring, but at least it’s mine - not some assembly-line, secondhand, hand-me-down life.

After a good-looking boy gives you rabies two, three times, you'll settle down and marry somebody less exciting for the rest of your life

By first believing in Santa Claus, then the Easter Bunny, then the Tooth Fairy, Rant Casey was recognizing that those myths are more than pretty stories and traditions to delight children. Or to modify behavior. Each of those three traditions asks a child to believe in the impossible in exchange for a reward. These are stepped-up tests to build a child's faith and imagination. The first test is to believe in a magical person, with toys as the reward. The second test is to trust in a magical animal, with candy as the reward. The last test is the most difficult, with the most abstract reward: To believe, trust in a flying fairy that will leave money. From a man to an animal to a fairy. From toys to candy to money. Thus, interestingly enough, transferring the magic of faith and trust from sparkling fairy-dom to clumsy, tarnished coins. From gossamer wings to nickels... dimes... and quarters. In this way, a child is stepped up to greater feats of imagination and faith as he or she matures. Beginning with Santa in infancy, and ending with the Tooth Fairy as the child acquires adult teeth. Or, plainly put, beginning with all the possibility of childhood, and ending with an absolute trust in the national currency.

Also consider that someday, when you’re dead and rotted, kids with their baby teeth will sit in their time-geography class and laugh about how stupid you were.

To repeat, the way you get to the huge, impossible yes is, you start collecting a lot of easy, small yeses.

I came to Party Crashing because accidents happen. People you love will die. Nothing you treasure will last forever. And I need to accept and embrace that fact.

History is nothing except monsters or victims. Or witnesses.

Each holiday tradition acts as an exercise in cognitive development, a greater challenge for the child. Despite the fact most parents don't recognize this function, they still practice the exercise. Rant also saw how resolving the illusions is crucial to how the child uses any new skills. A child who is never coached with Santa Claus may never develop an ability to imagine. To him, nothing exists except the literal and tangible. A child who is disillusioned abruptly, by his peers or siblings, being ridiculed for his faith and imagination, may choose never to believe in anything- tangible or intangible- again. To never trust or wonder. But a child who relinquishes the illusions of Santa Claus, the Easter Bunny, and the Tooth Fairy, that child may come away with the most important skill set. That child may recognize the strength of his own imagination and faith. He will embrace the ability to create his own reality. That child becomes his own authority. He determines the nature of his world. His own vision. And by doing so, by the power of his example, he determines the reality of the other two types: those who can't imagine, and those who can't trust.

This is how fast your life can turn around. How the future you have tomorrow won't be the same future you had yesterday.

Picture the moment when your mom and dad first saw you as something other than a pretty, tiny version of them. You as them, but improved. Better educated. Innocent. Then picture when you stopped being their dream.

Ask yourself: What did I eat for breakfast today? What did I eat for dinner last night? You see how fast reality fades away?

Every high school has its Romeo and Juliet, one tragic couple. So does every generation.

Beginning with Santa Claus as a cognitive exercise, a child is encouraged to share the same idea of reality as his peers. Even if that reality is patently invented and ludicrous, belief is encouraged with gifts that support and promote the common cultural lies. The greatest consensus in modern society is our traffic systems. The way a flood of strangers can interact, sharing a path, almost all of them traveling without incident. It only takes one dissenting driver to create anarchy.

If you look at old pictures, Irene Casey is so pretty. Not just young, but pretty the way you look when your face goes smooth, the skin around your eyes and lips relaxed, the pretty you only look when you love the person taking the picture.

you ever been trapped in a world where you're everyone's worst nightmare?

Kids grow up connected to nothing these days, plugged in and living lives boosted to them from other people.

Beginning with Santa in infancy, and ending with the Tooth Fairy as the child acquires adult teeth. Or, plainly put, beginning with all the possibility of childhood, and ending with an absolute trust in the national currency.