Andrew Davidson

“And just when you start thinking that you've accepted who you are, that changes, too. Because who you are is not permanent.”

“...so when you didn't mention marriage again I assumed that you had been talking idly, the way men do when they're feeling romantic.”

“I envy all suffering, because suffering is necessary to become spiritually beautiful.”

“The burn unit is often the most distant wing of a hospital, because burn victims are so susceptible to infection that they must be kept away from other patients. More important, perhaps, is that the placement minimizes the chance of visitors stumbling across a Kentucky Fried Human.”

“That which abides the fire shall become clean. The water of separation shall purify. The Lord is a consuming fire. That which can't abide the fire shall go through water.”

“Personal growth must sometimes be measured by distance travelled rather than by current position”

“How deep was the grim sorter of the dark and the foul going to send me?”

“It was not long before I discovered that withdrawing addicts lost their composure in exactly the same manner that careless millionaires lose their money: gradually, then suddenly.”

“Personally, I believe it's a poor idea to tell a seven-year-old girl that God's tremendous plan is to incinerate her lungs.”

“What is it like to wear another person’s skin?”“I don’t have a good answer for that,” I said. “It hurts.”“Can you remember their stories? Can you feel the love that they felt?”

“You are mine, I am yours: you may be sure of this. You've been locked inside my heart, the key has been thrown away; within it, you must always stay.”

“As in any proper fairy tale, there's a majick formula, in this case called the Rule of Nines.”

“As the paramedics lifted her, my grandmother's corpulent arms swung like bat wings with the life squeezed out of them.”

“He was evidently a most captivating good-time Charlie, quick with his dick and quicker to split.”

“The doctors removed my wasteland exterior by debriding me, scraping away the charred flesh. they brought in tanks of liquid nitrogen containing skin recently harvested from corpses. The sheets were thawed in pans of water, then neatly arranged on my back and stapled into place. Just like that, as if they were laying strips of sod over the problem areas behind their summer cabins, they wrapped me in the skin of the dead. My body was cleaned constantly but I rejected these sheets of necro-flesh anyway; I've never played well with others. So over and over again, I was sheeted with cadaver skin.”

“Following my accident, I plumped up like a freshly roasted wiener, my skin cracking to accommodate the expanding meat. The doctors, with their hungry scalpels, hastened the process with a few quick slices. The procedure is called an escharotomy, and it gives the swelling tissue the freedom to expand. It's rather like the uprising of your secret inner being, finally given license to claw through the surface. The doctors thought they had sliced me open to commence my healing but, in fact, they only release the monster- a thing of engorged flesh, suffused with juice.”

“The serpent tries to engulf my head. No, not a snake, an oxygen mask.”

“Coffin,why no lid? Too antiseptic for Hell, and could the roof of heaven really be made of gray metal?”

“He recoils at the sight of me. Are they suppose to do that?”

“Christ, I'm in Hell and they wear uniforms.”

“The most difficult thing about writing, I'm discovering, is not the act of constructing the sentences themselves. It's deciding what to put in, and where, and what to leave out. I'm constantly second-guessing myself. I chose the accident, but I could just as easily have started with any point during my thirty-five years of life before that. Why not start with: " I was born in the year 19-, in the city of -?”

“I have no idea whether beginning with my accident was the best decision, as I've never written a book before. Truth be told, I started with the crash because I wanted to catch your interest and drag you into the story. You're still reading, so it seems to have worked.”

“Just as I was beginning my drift into unconsciousness, there was an explosion. Not a movie explosion but a small real-life explosion, like the ignition of an unhappy gas oven that holds a grudge against its owner.”

“I could hear the hiss of various gases escaping the engine and the tires still spinning outside, above, and there was the creak of metal settling as the car stopped rocking, a pathetic turtle on its back.”

“My flesh began to singe as if I were a scrap of meat newly thrown onto the barbecue, and then i could hear the bubbling of my skin as the flames kissed it.”

“There's the smell of the devil's mischievousness, a pitchfork in your ass and sulfur in your mouth. The Bastard's there, all right, don't doubt it.”

“There was a brief moment of weightlesssness: a balancing point between air and earth, dirt and heaven. How strange, I thought, how like the moment between sleeping and falling when everything is beautifully surreal and nothing is corporeal. How like floating towards completion. But as often happens in that time between existing in the world and fading into dreams, this moment over the edge ended with the ruthless jerk back to awareness.”

“quod me nutrit, me destruit”

“Don't be wasting your sympathy on me, kid. I did pretty damn well, I'll tell you what. You snag a woman like that, you don't ask what you did to deserve it. You just hope she never wises up and changes her mind.”

“This is the truth: we all desire to conquer the comely one, because it affirms our own worth. Speaking for the men of the world, we want to own the beauty of the woman we're fucking. We want to grasp that beauty, tightly in our greedy little fingers, to well and truly possess it, to make it ours. We want to do this as the woman shines her way through an orgasm. That's perfection. And while I can't speak for women, I imagine that they-whether they admit it or not-want the same thing: to possess the man, to own his rough handsomeness, if only for a few seconds.”

“The problem with people like us is that we don't die properly.”

“…She kissed me on my thin lips and all my words were pushed back into my mouth. “I don’t want to die,” she whispered, “but I need to lose the shackles of this multitude of hearts.”

“Coincidentally, a good age for a Japanese girl is younger than twenty five, because that's when she turns into a 'Christmas Cake'. Christmas cakes, as everyone knows, are desirable before the twenty fifth but afterward quickly become stale and are put on the shelf. ”

“The urge is always with me to retouch yesterday's canvas with today's paintbrush and cover the things that fill me with regret..”

“Vanity is both a great motivator and a great deceiver.”

“If you’re going through hell, keep going[as stolen from Winston S. Churchill]”

“Things should be judged by distance traveled rather than by current position.”

“She had what I'd call a lemming ass - that is, an ass that you would follow right over the edge of the cliff.”

“There's a gentle sigh which descends like billowing silk upon the soul that accepts its coming death. It's a gentle pocket of air in the turbulence of everyday life... the silk settles around you as if it has been drifting towards the earth forever and has finally found it's target. The flag of defeat has been mercifully dropped and, in this action, the loss is not so bad. Defeat itself is defeated by the embrace of defeat, and death is swallowed up in victory.”

“When I answered that I did not pray, he sternly rebuked me. "You're in Hell. You'd better start".”

“Who would have guessed that the monster of fraud was a democracy?”

“. . . how could I protect myself? I had the Viking's scabbard, but not the sword; I had the Buddhist's robe, but not the faith.”

“Didn't anyone ever tell you that the mouth is the front gate of all misfortune?”

“There I lay, wearing dead people as armor against death.”

“Love is an action you must repeat ceaselessly.”

“She worked diligently to develop her understanding of breath; for she knew that with breath she could create a world. She imagined herself breathing life into the glass and, with every week that passed, Sei came closer to realizing the loveliness of the objects that she could picture in her imagination.”

“My words were Egyptian hieroglyphics before the discovery of the Rosetta stone; my words were wounded soldiers limping home, guns spent, from a lost battle; my words were dying fish, flipping hysterically as the net is opened and the pile spreads across the boat deck like a slippery mountain trying to become a prairie.My words were, and are, unworthy of Marianne Engel.”

“Love isn't a steadfast dog at all; love is more like a pygmy mouse lemur. Yes, that's exactly what love is: a tiny, jittery primate with eyes that are permanently peeled open in fear. For those of you who cannot quite picture a pygmy mouse lemur, imagine a miniature Don Knotts or Steve Buscemi wearing a fur coat.”

“You'll swoop from incredible highs when you're just glad to be alive, to those lows when you wish you were dead. And just when you start thinking that you've accepted who you are, that changes, too. Because who you are is not permanent”

“Scatology was strictly out, as nowhere in my psyche do I harbor the desire to shit on someone and even less do I have the inclination to be shat upon. And if I a a snob for not participating in films that involve sex with animals, then so be it; I am a snob.”