Craig Clevenger · 199 pages
Rating: (9K votes)
“A person’s life story is equal to what they have plus what they want most in the world, minus what they’re actually willing to sacrifice for it.”
― Craig Clevenger, quote from The Contortionist's Handbook
“It's taken me years of practice to learn how to act natural.”
― Craig Clevenger, quote from The Contortionist's Handbook
“i learned that predators don't intentionally choose the weak or old or sick. they kill what they can, which means the slow members of the pack. thus, they strengthen the very gene pool they're feeding from. the threshold for what is weak, old or sick gets raised, and the strength, speed and instincts of new generations of hunters grow. a beautiful, self-perpetuating system where evolution is the antithesis of entropy.”
― Craig Clevenger, quote from The Contortionist's Handbook
“When you’re in love, your brain secretes endorphins into your blood. Organic morphine leaks out of a gland in your skull, feels like a low-grade opium rush. Some people confuse the two, the head rush and the love. You think you’re in love with a person, but you’re in love with a syringe.”
― Craig Clevenger, quote from The Contortionist's Handbook
“...what they show tells you what they want to hide.”
― Craig Clevenger, quote from The Contortionist's Handbook
“I love you, I said, but not out loud.”
― Craig Clevenger, quote from The Contortionist's Handbook
“The combination to be on guard for is young and bored, or young and resentful. You can spot them at social gatherings, the grad students or interns who tell you about syndromes, conditions, deviances, and disorders, and they love, love, love to talk. They speak in half-sentences with a knowing smile-squint, watch you falter at the pause, and then keep talking.”
― Craig Clevenger, quote from The Contortionist's Handbook
“If no God, there must at least be a pattern-making demiurge.”
― Craig Clevenger, quote from The Contortionist's Handbook
“People can numb themselves, get used to anything.”
― Craig Clevenger, quote from The Contortionist's Handbook
“Carisoprodol. Comes in a white tablet like a big-ass vitamin, 350 mg of muscle liquefier for those tense, recovering athletes and furniture movers. Too much, and those relaxed muscles include your diaphragm, then your heart.”
― Craig Clevenger, quote from The Contortionist's Handbook
“They see my fingers, they run. Dominique. Alicia. Penny.
They see my fingers, they want their hair pulled. Alex. Renee. Kristin.”
― Craig Clevenger, quote from The Contortionist's Handbook
“My left hand is a Rorschach blotch all its own, a six-fingered, skin-blood-and-bone ink splatter. People see it and fly their worst fears and secret fetishes at full mast when they think they’re being discreet. They see it as strange, fascinating, ugly, beautiful, disgusting or erotic depending on what’s behind their eyes.”
― Craig Clevenger, quote from The Contortionist's Handbook
“A person's life story is equal to what they have plus what they want most in the world, minus what they're actually willing to sacrifice for it.”
― Craig Clevenger, quote from The Contortionist's Handbook
Craig Clevenger
Born place: in Dallas, Texas, The United States
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“We now live in a world where I think many people walk around asking themselves , do other people matter? Does the rest of the world mean anything to me? Or is all that matters this very small world of friends and family and colleagues that I've constructed for myself?”
― Drew Magary, quote from The Postmortal
“Sir, if you are otherwise discreet, you will consider that you have gone far enough. At my brother's request I am treating you no less kindly than Ampflise treated my uncle Gahmuret, without going to bed together. My kindness would in the long run outweigh hers, if anyone were to weigh us properly. And besides, Sir, I don't know who you are, and yet in such a short space of time you want to have my love.”
― Wolfram von Eschenbach, quote from Parzival
“We used to shoot a man who acted like a dog, but honor was real there, you were protecting something. But here? This is the land of the great big dogs, you don't love a man here, you eat him! That's the principle ; the only one we live by.”
― Arthur Miller, quote from All My Sons
“They’d crossed over to that continent where grieving parents lived. It looked the same as the rest of the world, but wasn’t. Colors bled pale. Music was just notes. Books no longer transported or comforted, not fully. Never again. Food was nutrition, little more. Breaths were sighs. And they knew something the rest didn’t. They knew how lucky the rest of the world was.”
― Louise Penny, quote from A Trick of the Light
“I felt heat and
my body trembled
and forces
beyond my control
pulled me to him
as the music ripped
through our bodies”
― Lisa Schroeder, quote from Far from You
Where the Heart Is
Beach Music
All Together Dead
The Passage
A Moveable Feast
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