Цитаты из книги Удушье

It's amazing what a woman will read into it if you by accident say, I love you. Ten times out of ten, a guy means I love this.

Plus I tell her, when you're looking at the pantyhose rack, they have all those colors and sizes. Nude, charcoal, beige, tan, black, cobalt, and none of them come in just "head-sized."

It's not fair how a woman never has to think of shit to keep from coming.

Paige said, "Maybe sex and affection aren't mutually exclusive." And I laughed. I told her, yes. Yes, they are.

Because nothing is as perfect as you can imagine it. Because nothing is as exciting as your fantasy.

Besides, at some point, the Mommy used to say, your memories, your stories and adventures, will be the only things you'll have left.

She used to say, "The only frontier you have left is the world of intangibles.Everything else is sewn up too tight." Caged inside too many laws. By intangibles, she meant the Internet, movies, music, stories, art, rumors, computer programs, anything that isn't real. Virtual realities. Make-believe stuff. The culture.

The laws that keep us safe, these same laws condemn us to boredom. Without access to true chaos, we'll never have true peace. Unless everything can get worse, it won't get any better.

We live and we die and anything else is just delusion. It's just passive chick bullshit about feelings and sensitivity. Just made-up subjective emotional crap. There is no soul. There is no God. There's just decisions and disease and death.

The cerebral cortex, the cerebellum," she said, "that's where your problem is. If she could just get down to using only her brain stem, she'd be cured. This would be somewhere beyond happiness and sadness. You don't see fish agonized by wild mood swings. Sponges never have a bad day.

"That's the big goal," she said. "To find a cure for knowledge." For education. For living in our heads.

Ever since the story of Adam and Eve in the Bible, humanity had been a little too smart for its own good, the Mommy said. Ever since eating that apple. Her goal was to find, if not a cure, then at least a treatment that would give people back their innocence.

"The smell of a new car is the smell of death."

The glue and resin smell in new cars is formaldehyde, she'd tell him, the same thing they use to preserve dead bodies. It's in new houses and new furniture. It's called off-gassing. You can inhale formaldehyde from new clothes. After you inhale enough, expect stomach cramps, vomiting, and diarrhea.

The theater of the mind. The bordello of the subconscious.

It's nice to see something more pathetic than I feel right now.

"You want to keep her weak so you're always the one in charge." She looks up at me and says, "It sounds as if you'd like to be God."

"Griping isn't the same as creating something," my mom's voice-over says. "Rebelling isn't rebuilding. Ridiculing isn't replacing..."

I fought against everything, but more and more I worry that I was never for anything.