Moon Palace Quotes
"I wanted to live dangerously, to push myself as far as I could go, and then see what happened to me when I got there."
"Chance as a form of readiness, a way of saving myself through the minds of others."
"I have no money to give you, and not one word of advice. Take the books to make me happy."
"Think of the satisfaction, I would explain to them, of crawling into bed and knowing that your dreams are about to take place on top of nineteenth-century American literature."
"All children are love children, but only the best ones are ever called that."
"Every man is the author of his own life. The book you are writing is not yet finished. Therefore, it’s a manuscript."
"The worse off I was, the more bizarre and contorted my inventions became."
"I would turn my life into a work of art, sacrificing myself to such exquisite paradoxes that every breath I took would teach me how to savor my own doom."
"My mind had begun to drift, and once that happened, I was powerless to stop it."
"I had lost the ability to think ahead, and no matter how hard I tried to imagine the future, I could not see it, I could not see anything at all."
"Other people became involved, and in the end they had as much to do with what happened to me as I did myself."
"I thought you were in danger, and I had never felt so sorry for anyone in my life."
"It does not lessen the terror of the fall, but it gives a new perspective on what that terror means."
"Everything was going to work out, I told myself, everything was going to come out copy in the end."
"You can’t live without establishing an equilibrium between the inner and outer."
"That something is what I define as love. It is the one thing that can stop a man from falling, the one thing powerful enough to negate the laws of gravity."
"Reality was a yo-yo, change was the only constant."
"I wanted to tell them how much they meant to me, but I couldn’t get the words out of my mouth."
"You’re the one who has to make the next move."
"All through that early period of our affair, we had only to look at each other to become aroused."
"The sun is the past, the earth is the present, the moon is the future."
"We’re all victims of something, Mr. Effing. If only of the fact that we’re alive."
"A hundred little signs have told me. I’m running out of time, and we’ve got to get started before it’s too late."
"There are any number of possible answers to your question. At this point, I don’t have enough information to say what that answer is."
"I used to think I was, but I’m not so sure anymore."
"It often happens that things are other than what they seem, and you can get yourself into trouble by jumping to conclusions."
"If we don’t watch out, they’ll get us all. The same thing happened to my Russian friend two months ago."
"That’s how the electric chair got invented. Edison cooked it up to show the dangers of alternating current, and then he sold it to Sing Sing prison, where they’re still using it to this day."
"If the world weren’t such a beautiful place, we might all turn into cynics."
"It wasn’t long before they decided to cart him off for good. Some place in New York State, I think it was. Lived in the nuthouse until the end, but he went on painting, if you can believe it, the son of a bitch didn’t know how to stop."
"Everything in them was faraway, shadowy, fraught with marvels."
"The words burst from my mouth like machine-gun bullets, a staccato of rapid-fire assault."
"The world enters us through our eyes, but we cannot make sense of it until it descends into our mouths."
"He was a monster, but at the same time he had it in him to be a good man, a man I could even bring myself to admire."
"I don’t think there was any question that I improved, but that does not mean I was ever entirely satisfied with my efforts."
"A sense of despair that becomes so great, so crushing, so catastrophic, that you have no choice but to be liberated by it."
"We find ourselves only by looking to what we're not. You can't put your feet on the ground until you've touched the sky."
"The only sound I want to hear is your pen moving across the paper."
"I was looking for oblivion, trying to drown in a degradation that would equal the loathing I felt for myself."
"The whole business was a sham anyway, and it made no difference what I did."
"The essentials had already been covered; there were no more secrets to be told, no more dark truths to be wrenched out of him."
"That’s enough," he said. "We’ll leave it there."
"I had never known of Berkeley’s plan to educate the Indians in Bermuda, and I had never known about the years he spent in Rhode Island."
"Whether she was alive or dead, whether she had remarried or not—what good would it have done to know those things? I forced myself to remain in the dark."
"If I had been responsible for bringing another person into the world, it was my duty to know about it."
"It was a difficult and tricky process, I learned, and in many instances I had to reconstruct passages almost entirely in order to remain faithful to their original meaning."
"I want to die with sex on my brain," he muttered. "There’s no better way to go out than that."
"For the next twenty days, I spent every morning in my room, typing out different versions of Effing’s life."
"It’s coming, I promise you. It’s coming very soon."
"Once you open it, you become invincible."
"But we’re perfectly dry. It’s mind over matter, Fogg. We’ve finally done it! We’ve cracked the secret of the universe!"
"I thought you’d get around to it sooner or later."
"By refusing to find out about Elizabeth, I kept myself strong."
"I’d rather be a crazy man than mess around with those thumpers."
"No one could have known what would happen; no one could have guessed the dark and terrible things that lay in store for us."
"The risk was simply too great, and once he learned that pleasure could be killed by humiliation, he seldom dared to try."
"His body was a dungeon, and he had been condemned to serve out the rest of his days in it."
"Books became a refuge for him early on, a place where he could keep himself hidden—not only from others, but from his own thoughts as well."
"The world was an obstacle course of staring eyes and pointing fingers, and he was an ambulatory freak show."
"He had reached his full adult height by the time he was fifteen, somewhere between six-two and six-three, and from then on his weight kept mounting."
"He was alone now, entirely separate from everyone: a bulbous, egg-shaped monad plodding through the shambles of his consciousness."
"Every morning, he would test himself by walking down Euclid Avenue at rush hour, and on Saturdays and Sundays he made a point of frittering away the afternoon in Weye Park, exposing himself to as many people as possible, pretending not to hear what the gawkers said, willing their glances to bounce off of him."
"He was no longer just the obese Solomon Barber, he was the Man Who Wore Hats."
"Imagine a 350-pound titan lumbering through the Yale quads in a ten-gallon hat. It just wouldn’t do."
"He had stopped looking at them, and therefore they had ceased to exist."
What do you think?" he kept saying to me as we looked it over. "Is this a chariot or what?
Nothing is sure," he whispered, "but it might do him some good. Maybe he'll be ready to see you again by the time we get back.
"We talked for a while about cars, I remember, and how America had been changed by them; we talked about Effing; we talked about Tesla’s tower on Long Island."
"Of all the fruits known to man, we both agreed that lemons smelled the best."
Jesus God, Marco, why did you have to bring me here?" he said at last. "Didn’t you know this would happen?
My bones might be broken," he said to me one afternoon, "but my heart is finally on the mend.
"For twenty-four years, I had lived with an unanswerable question, and little by little I had come to embrace that enigma as the central fact about myself."
"I felt the earth as a planet whirling through the heavens. It wasn’t big, I discovered, it was small—it was almost microscopic. Of all the objects in the universe, nothing is smaller than the earth."
"It was a stunning transformation, and once it was fully underway, it unleashed a number of remarkable side-effects."
This is where I start," I said to myself, "this is where my life begins.