The Gum Thief Quotes
"Everybody past a certain age—regardless of how they look on the outside—pretty much constantly dreams of being able to escape from their lives."
"It’s taken me what—five years?—to simply get used to the idea that I’ve blown things. I’m grieving, grieving hard-core."
"I’m sad at having flubbed the few chances I had to make bold strokes in life."
"Life always kills you in the end, but first it prevents you from getting what you want."
"Sorrow is everywhere—a bruise that never yellows and never fades, a weed that chokes the crop."
"I think emotions affect your body as much as X-rays and vitamins and car crashes."
"Every moment felt like I was getting away with something. Every moment felt like five o’clock quitting time. Paradise!"
"I miss sex. Once upon a time I could take off my shirt and walk down by the beach carrying a Frisbee and there wasn’t a girl there I couldn’t confidently chat up."
"Most young people don’t know a single person who’s died. I’m a throwback."
"People never mention that as the upside of death, do they? It makes your own death less scary to figure you’re going to meet up again with old friends!"
"Literature was a place of experimentation—a laboratory, an art gallery where exciting new ideas never, ever, ever, ever stopped."
"Imagine how they would all end up either mummified inside a regional landfill, or incinerated, the ashes floating about the Van Allen radiation belt."
"To find one of Steve’s novels in a second-hand store was to experience the same sort of lump in the chest one feels when reading in the paper about a baby being smothered by parents on crack."
"What if everybody on earth suddenly turned stupid? What if we couldn’t make lipstick or anything else?"
"Booze makes me feel the way being in a womb must feel."
"People go nuts. They abandon you. They stop liking you. They get lost in their own worlds and they never come back."
"The modern world is devoted to vanishing species, vanishing weather and vanishing capacity for wonder."
"Dreams don’t come true. Dreams die. Dreams get compromised."
"I deserve better than to be forced to document my cruel fate at the hands of a pat of butter."
"I don’t care. I feel free! I feel dirty! I feel submissive! I feel... the end."
"Dreams choke to death on bay leaves. Dreams get spleen cancer."
"I think it’s better to not know the lyrics to your life."
"I’m sick of everything leaving my life, and nothing new ever coming my way."
"What’s the nature of this divine computer program that drives everything to go forward? Why doesn’t DNA sometimes say to itself, ‘You know what? I’m tired of this survival shit. I think I’m going to pack it in. It ends here.’"
"Imagine feeling more powerful and more capable of falling in love with life every new day instead of being scared and sick and not knowing whether to stay under a sheet or venture forth into the cold."
"What keeps me going right now is the notion that, stripped of any form of protective coating – of stupidity, of youth, of ignorance, of money – of anything that might allow me to delude myself, I still manage to hang in there."
"It’s like a magic spell. Once you lose faith in it, it’s merely more junk in life."
"We’re made of filler. We’re hot dogs, Roger. DNA is basically this containment system required to hold all of the goop we flatter ourselves into thinking is so holy."
"I remember watching documentaries about WWII, how in Germany in 1946 there were two women for every man, and even at the age of six, I thought, ‘Yeah, that sounds far more realistic.’"
"Christmas celebrates the moment in our history as a species when we stopped being prey and began making weapons and traps and turned into predators."
"Everyone knows what a weight-loss clinic is."