“As the components of your life are stripped away, after all the ambitions and hopes vaporize, you reach a self-reflective starkness-- the repetitious plucking of a single overwound string.”
― Arthur Nersesian, quote from The Fuck-Up
“Perhaps the price of comfort is that life passes more rapidly. But for anyone who has lived in uneasiness, even for a short, memorable duration, it's a trade-off that will gladly be made.”
― Arthur Nersesian, quote from The Fuck-Up
“My last chance had vanished into itself like a snail coiling up into his shell.
Insidiously I had lost my grip, and now this was it. I thought all this without much emotion. I really didn't care anymore. I couldn't hang on anymore. I didn't have the guts to kill myself, but I didn't want it to continue. I walked a couple of blocks, empty, listless, and wished I could cry.
...The diabolic hope, the purposeful pulsing of blood, the flight into coherence allowed for some rationalizing an afterlife. A new theology was evolving, one that had a faith-in-death clause. It was evolved when I kicked a dead waterbug on the pavement. It was dried out, hollowed, emptied, like some kind of shell. Maybe, I thought, its body is a shell, maybe all bodies are shells. We hatch and die. Our spirit or something like that is the yoke: it lives the real life, the true life.
It wasn't comforting.”
― Arthur Nersesian, quote from The Fuck-Up
“Some of the more industrious ones were washing the windshields of cars that had been trapped by the red light. I used to see them from inside cars and think they brought it on themselves, and they probably did but now it didn't make a difference. I went over to the fire and warmed my hands with the group. I looked at their faces: idiots, criminals, retards, schizophrenics, paranoids, rejects, fuck-ups, broken-down failures. Alone, once children, never asked to be put on this earth, they ended up as jurors. Their lives were the verdict: the system, the man, something had failed.”
― Arthur Nersesian, quote from The Fuck-Up
“When I was in my teens, I made an appraisal of how comfortable my life could turn out when I became the age I am now. Because of a mechanical failure, the prediction was inexact.”
― Arthur Nersesian, quote from The Fuck-Up
“In Brooklyn I am content, the closest we can come to a sustained happiness.”
― Arthur Nersesian, quote from The Fuck-Up
“Once, as a teenager, I had believed that people could change themselves. Finally I realized that all one could ever hope was understanding one's filthy self better.”
― Arthur Nersesian, quote from The Fuck-Up
“I had grazed along the surface of her actions and made deep judgments. Rejecting someone because you couldn't understand their love, that was a new one. The more I thought about it the longer the shadow of doubt stretched over all my conclusions. More often than not, things were as they seemed. But as I stared at her, she wasn't as bad looking as I had once thought. I realized how all this time I had seen her the wrong way, and how one's character affects one's appearance. Although she wasn't my type she was attractive. As I thought about her - the vulnerable intelligence, the violent honesty, and the fact that in the entire city she was the only one who took me in and fed me - she became more and more irresistible. Baited by an obscure beauty, trapped by an intense sorrow - all prior definitions had been overruled: this was love.”
― Arthur Nersesian, quote from The Fuck-Up
Arthur Nersesian
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“I’ll accompany you too, fair lady,” said Reven. “I would fain meet your grandmother.”
“You would what?” said Elfwyn.
“He means he’d like to,” said Jinx. Some of the books in Simon’s house used old-fashioned words like that.”
― quote from Jinx
“The most potent tool in maintaining the status quo is our belief that change is impossible.”
― Russell Brand, quote from Revolution
“The purpose of a volcano is to die,' she says. 'Is this not what you strive for?'
'The purpose of a volcano is to die, my lady,' says the volcano, 'but as angrily as possible.”
― Patrick Ness, quote from The Crane Wife
“I like to keep my books in my library, he said, 'and I like my library to get bigger rather than smaller.”
― Joseph Delaney, quote from The Spook's Apprentice - Play Edition
“Niels remembered all too well the telex machine that had received updates and warnings from Interpol's headquarters in Lyon. The telex machine had run nonstop. The monotonous sound of the mechanical printer reminded them that the world was a fucked-up place. If anyone wanted a brief, concentrated look into the world's misery, all he had to do was spend 20 minutes in front of the humming machine: serial killers, drug smuggling, women kidnapped for prostitution, cross-border traffic with stolen children, illegal immigration, enriched uranium.... You could get a headache simply from standing in front of the fax machine. It made you want to scream and run away; to jump into the sea and wish that life had never crawled up out of the water, that the dinosaurs still dominated the earth.”
― quote from The Last Good Man
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