The largest website for English phrases and quotes

The largest website for English phrases and quotes

Category: Jess Walter

Maybe it’s ALWAYS the end of the world. Maybe you’re alive for a while, and then you realize you’re going to die, and that’s such an insane thing to comprehend, you look around for answers and the only answer is that the world must die with you.Sure, the world seems crazy now. But wouldn’t it seem just as crazy if you were alive when they sacrificed peasants, when people were born into slavery, when they killed first-born sons, crucified priests, fed people to lions, burned them on stakes, when they intentionally gave people smallpox or syphilis, when they gassed them, burned them, dropped atomic bombs on them, when entire races tried to wipe other races off the planet? Yes, we’ve ruined the planet and melted the ice caps and depleted the ozone, and we’re always finding new ways to kill one another. Yeah, we’re getting cancer at an alarming rate and suicides are at an all-time high, and, sure, we’ve got people so depressed they take a drug that could turn them into pasty-skinned animals who go around all night dancing and having sex and eating stray cats and small dogs and squirrels and mice and very, very rarely- the statistics say you’re more likely to be killed by lightning- a person.But this is the Apocalypse? Fuck you! It’s always the Apocalypse. The world hasn’t gone to shit. The world is shit.All I’d asked was that it be better managed.

apocalypse, dystopia, end-of-the-world

Put the fire out? Hell no. What we need to do is stoke it.

gossip, publicity, rumors, scandal

I have this theory, that this will be the only city that future archaeologists find, Las Vegas. The dry climate will preserve it all and teams of scientists in the year 5000 will carefully sweep and scrape away the sand to find pyramids and castles and replicas of the Eiffel Tower and the New York skyline and stripper poles and snapper cards and these future archaeologists will re-create our entire culture based solely on this one shallow and cynical little shithole. We can complain all we want that this city doesn’t represent us. We can say, Yes, but I hated Las Vegas. Or I only went there once. Well, I’m sure not all Romans reveled in the torture-fests at the Colosseum either, but there it is.

america, culture, las-vegas, rome

It was curious what trying to speak English had done lately to his mind; it reminded him of studying poetry in college, words gaining and losing their meaning, overlapping with images, the curious echo of ideas behind the words people used.

language, poetry

Among the world’s evils—fascism, ethnic cleansing, environmental degradation— smoking deserves the most severe curricular attention in my kid’s school.

Two kinds of people always lie about their ages: actresses and Latin American pitchers.

But it’s not easy, realising how we fucked it all up. And that turns out to be the hardest thing to live with, not the regret or the fear, but the realisation that the edge is so close to where we live.

(…) my money guy Richard is going without a tie now, like a politician who wants to appeal to the suffering common man (or perhaps every morning his firm takes the ties and shoelaces away from the brokers and financial planners to keep them from offing themselves)

brokers, finance, humor, suicide

Here for business or pleasure, Mr. Wheeler?””Redemption,” Shane says.

Weren’t movies his generation’s faith anyway–its true religion? Wasn’t the theater our temple, the one place we enter separately but emerge from two hours later together, with the same experience, same guided emotions, same moral?…what was that but a religion?

movies, my-religion, truth

Use beautiful to describe a sandwich, and the word means nothing.

I guess I forgot we were going out tonight.””We always go out on Fridays.””It’s Thursday, Alvis.””You are so tied to routine.

drinking, humor, routine