Steve Toltz
85 quotes
Biography
"Sometimes not talking is effortless, and other times it’s more exhausting than lifting pianos."
"Regrets came up and asked me if I’d like to own them. Declined them for the most part but took a few just so I wouldn’t leave this relationship empty handed."
"You never hear about a sportsman losing his sense of smell in a tragic accident, and for good reason; in order for the universe to teach excruciating lessons that we are unable to apply in later life, the sportsman must lose his legs, the philosopher his mind, the painter his eyes, the musician his ears, the chef his tongue."
"Most of my life I never worked out whether to pity, ignore, adore, judge, or murder my father. His mystifying behavior left me wavering right up until the end."
"OK, Jasper. Here it is: The world's not falling apart imperceptibly anymore, these days it makes a loud shredding noise! In every city of the world, the smell of hamburgers marches brazenly down the street looking for old friends! In traditional fairy tales, the wicked witch was ugly; in modern ones, she has high cheekbones and silicone implants! People are not mysterious because they never shut up! Belief illuminates the way a blindfold does! Are you listening, Jasper?"
"Look, Jasper," Dad said as we settled on a bench. "It's about time you found out how your grandparents fucked up, so you can work out what you did with the failures of your antecedents: did you run with them or ricochet against their errors, instead making your own huge gaffes in an opposing orbit? We all crawl feebly away from our grandparents' graves with their sad act of dying ringing in our ears, and in our mouths we have the aftertaste of their grossest violation against themselves: the shame of their unlived lives. It's only the steady accumulation of regrets and failures and our shame of our unlived lives that opens the door to understanding them. If by some quirk of fate we led charmed lives, bounding energetically from one masterful success to another, we'd never understand them! never!"
"I tell you, it's indescribable the joy children get from watching a fight. It's a blinding Christmas orgasm for a child. And this is human nature undiluted by age and experience! This is mankind fresh out of the box! Whoever says it's life that makes monsters out of people should check out the raw nature of children, a lot of pups who haven't yet had their dose of failure, regret, disappointment, and betrayal but still behave like savage dogs. I have nothing against children, I just wouldn't trust one not to giggle if I accidentally stepped on a land mine."
"Pride is the first thing you need to do away with in life. It's there to make you feel good about yourself. It's like putting a suit on a shriveled carrot and taking it out to the theater and pretending it's someone important. The first step in self-liberation is to be free of self-respect. I understand why it's useful for some. When people have nothing, they can still have their pride. That's why the poor were given the myth of nobility, because the cupboards were bare. Are you listening to me? This is important, Jasper. I don't want you to have anything to do with nobility, pride, or self-respect. They're tools to help you bronze your own head."
"And now everyone returning from an armed conflict is called a hero too. In the old days you had to commit specific acts of valor during war; now you just need to turn up. These days when a war is on, heroism seems to mean 'attendance.'"
"I had only a splinter of awareness back then that no matter what anybody says, choosing between the available options is not the same as thinking for yourself. The only true way of thinking for yourself is to create options of your own, options that don't exist."
"When people think your days are numbered, they're really very nice to you. It's only when you're trying to get on in the world that they bring their claws out."
"Even ugly people know beauty when they don't see it."
"While Terry joined the others in the pool, I subjected myself to a dreadful thing called musical chairs, another cruel game. There's one chair short, and when the music stops you have to run for a seat. The life lessons never stop at a children's party. The music blares. You never know when it's going to stop. You're on edge the whole game; the tension is unbearable. Everyone dances in a circle around the ring of chairs, but it's no happy dance. Everyone has his eyes on the mother over by the radio, her hand poised on the volume control. Now and then a child wrongly anticipates her and dives for a chair. He's shouted at. He jumps off the seat again. He's a wreck. The music plays on. The children's faces are contorted in terror. No one wants to be excluded. The mother taunts the children by pretending to reach for the volume. The children wish they were dead. The game is an analogy for life: there are not enough chairs or good times to go around, not enough food, not enough joy, nor beds nor jobs nor laughs nor friends nor smiles nor money nor clean air to breathe...and yet the music goes on."
"I'd learned a valuable lesson: people almost never look up. Who knows why? Maybe they're looking at the soil for a preview of coming attractions. And so they should. I think anyone who says he looks to the future and doesn't have one eye on the dirt is being short-sighted."
"OK, boys, you heard the man. Get out of here. Come back, though, I've got lots more stuff. And you never know, maybe we can work together one day. Just because I'm in here for life doesn't mean I won't be out one day. Life doesn't really mean life. It's just a figure of speech. It means an eternity which is actually shorter than life, if you know what I mean."
"I took a step closer to the edge. High in the trees I could hear the sounds of birds. They weren't chirping, they were just moving around making everything rustle. Down near the earth brown beetles were rummaging in the dirt, not thinking about death. It didn't seem to me I'd be missing out on much. Existence is humiliating anyway. If Someone was watching us build, decay, create, degenerate, believe, and wither as we do, he'd never stop laughing. So why not? What do I know about suicide? Only that it is a melodramatic act, as well as an admission that the heat is too hot so I'm getting out of this crazy kitchen. And why shouldn't a fourteen-year-old commit suicide? Sixteen-year-olds do it all the time. Maybe I'm just ahead of my time. Why shouldn't I end it all?"
"You experience life alone, you can be as intimate with another as much as you like, but there has to be always a part of you and your existence that is incommunicable; you die alone, the experience is yours alone, you might have a dozen spectators who love you, but your isolation, from birth to death, is never fully penetrated. What if death is the same aloneness, though, for eternity? An incommunicable, cruel, and infinite loneliness. We don't know what death is. Maybe it's that."
"Let me save you some time. There is no bottom. Despair is bottomless. You'll never get there, and that's why I know you'll never kill yourself. Not you. Only those attached to the trivial things take their own lives, but you never will. You see, a person who reveres life and family and all that stuff, he'll be the first to put his neck in a noose, but those who don't think too highly of their loves and possessions, those who know too well the lack of purpose of it all, they're the ones who can't so it. Do you know what irony is? Well, you just heard one. If you believe in immortality, you can kill yourself, but if you feel that life is a brief flicker between two immense voids to which humanity is unfairly condemned, you wouldn't dare. Look, Marty, you're in an untenable situation. You don't have the resources to live a full life, yet you can't bring yourself to die. So what do you do?"
"No one listened to me. Caroline and I stood together as they dragged Terry away to a mental asylum. I looked at my parents incredulously, at their inexorably tepid souls. All I could do was uselessly shake a clenched fist and think how people are so eager to become slaves that it's unbelievable. Christ. Sometimes they throw off their freedom so quickly, you'd think it was burning them."
"It's so rare that people give you real, practical advice. Normally they say things like "Don't worry," and "Everything will be OK," which is not only impractical, it's exasperating, and you have to wait until they're diagnosed with a terminal disease before you can say it back to them with any pleasure."
"...What did I have to lose Would they really bother giving me another life sentence? I already have six!" Harry paused here a moment, reflecting, and said quietly, "I'll tell you something, Marty, there's freedom in forever."
"Betrayal wears a lot of different hats. You don't have to make a show of it like Brutus did, you don't have to leave anything visible jutting from the base of your best friend's spine, and afterward can stand there straining your ears for hours, but you won't hear a cock crow either. No, the most insidious betrayals are done merely by leaving the life jacket hanging in your closet while you lie to yourself that it's probably not the drowning man's size. That's how we slide, and while we slide we blame the world's problems on colonialism, imperialism, capitalism, corporatism, stupid white men, and America, but there's no need to make a brand name of blame. Individual self-interest: that's the source of our descent, and it doesn't start in the boardroom or the war rooms either. It starts in the home."
"What followed was a period of lost time: three years, during which I felt myself circling the questions that had been circling me, though I never found the answers I needed. While searching, I went for walks. I read. I taught myself the art of reading while walking. I lay under trees and watched the clouds creep across the sky through a veil of leaves. I passed whole months thinking. I discovered more about the properties of loneliness, how it is like the slow squeeze of testicles by a hand that has just been in the refrigerator. If I could not find a way to be authentically in the world, then I would find a superior way of hiding, and to that end I tried on different masks: shy, graceful, pensive, buoyant, jovial, frail - they were the simple masks that had one defining characteristic. Other times I tried on more complicated masks, somber and buoyant, vulnerable yet cheerful, proud yet brooding. These I ultimately abandoned as they required too much upkeep on an energy level. Take it from me: complex masks eat you alive in maintenance."
"When you withdraw from the world, the world withdraws too, in equal measure. It's a two-step, you and the world. I didn't look for trouble, and it wore me down that none found me. Doing nothing is as tumultuous for me as working on the floor of the New York Stock Exchange on the morning of a market crash. It's how I'm made. Nothing happened to me in three years and it was very, very stressful."
"Democracy in crime was turning out no different from democracies everywhere: a sublime idea in theory, soiled by the reality that deep down nobody really believes that all men are created equal."