Steve Toltz

“Je me demandais si c'était blasphémer que dire à Dieu que les arcs-en-ciel sont kitsch.”

“Pauvre Terry. On ne pouvait pas le distinguer d'un lit. C'était vraiment triste.”

“I've been labelled many times - a criminal, an anarchist, a rebel, sometimes human garbage, but never a philosopher, which is a pity because that's what I am. I chose a life apart from the common flow, not only because the common flow makes me sick but because I question the logic of the flow, and not only that - I don't know if the flow exists! Why should I chain myself to the wheel when the wheel itself might be a construct, an invention, a common dream to enslave us?”

“Come on, just say, "I do." It comes from the verb "to do." That's all you need for now. Then we'll move you on to "I did.”

“There's freedom in looking crazy.”

“We were lazy people on an adventure, flirting with life but too shy to go all the way.”

“How could I tell him that I now wanted what he had once wanted----to travel on trains and fall in love with girls with dark eyes and extravagant lips? It didn't matter to me if at the end of it I had nothing to show but sore thighs. It wasn't my fault that the life of the wanderer, the wayfarer, had fallen out of favor with the world. So what if it was no longer acceptable to drift with the wind, asking for bread and a roof, sleeping on bales of hay and enjoying dalliances with barefooted farmgirls, then running away before the harvest? This was the life I wanted, blowing around like a leaf with appetites.”

“I dug out an old brown suitcase and threw a few clothes into it, then looked around my bedroom for memorabilia, but stopped when I remembered that the purpose of memorabilia is to trigger memory. I didn't want to be lugging my memories all over the place. They were to heavy.”

“The world's not falling apart imperceptibly anymore, these days it makes a loud shredding noise!”

“That’s what first love is all about. What happens is you meet a love object and immediately a hole inside you starts aching, the hole that is always there but you don’t notice until someone comes along, plugs it up, and then runs away with the plug.”

“When you put so much effort to forget someone, the effort itself becomes a memory. Then you have to forget the forgetting, and that too is memorable.”

“You never hear of 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 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.”

“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.”

“...I thought how I hate any kind of mob - I hate mobs of sports fans, mobs of environmental demonstrators, I even hate mobs of super-models, that's how much I hate mobs. I tell you, mankind is bearable only when you get him on his own.”

“We just didn't get it. We were weakened and exhilarated at the same time. A paranoiac's nightmare! A narcissist's dream! We didn't know how to feel: flattered or raped. Maybe both. We were puzzling at breakneck speed.”

“...I wondered if it was blasphemous to tell God that rainbows are kitsch.”

“To my horror principles have wormed their way into [the] fabric of my being.”

“When we finished the kiss she said laughing, I can taste your loneliness - it tastes like vinegar. That annoyed me. Everyone knows loneliness tastes like cold potato soup.”

“The past is truly an inoperable tumour that spreads to the present.”

“Sometimes they [people] throw off their freedom so quickly, you'd think it was burning them.”

“Amen' is like the Send button on an email.”

“Are you listening, Jasper? Sometimes you'll be walking in the city late at night, and a woman walking in front of you will spin her head around and then cross the street simply because some members of your gender rape women and molest children!”

“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 you 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 boardrooms or the war rooms either. It starts in the home.”

“I’ll teach you how to decipher all the confused faces by closing your eyes & how to cringe when someone says the words ‘your generation’. I will teach you how not to demonise your enemies & how to make yourself unappetising when the hordes turn up to eat you. I’ll teach you how to yell with your mouth closed & how to steal happiness & how the only real joy is singing yourself hoarse & nude girls & how never to eat in an empty restaurant & how not to leave the windows of your heart open when it looks like rain & how everyone has a stump where something necessary was amputated. I’ll teach you how to know what’s missing.”

“Don't be afraid to have nothing.”

“Sex: the match that sets off human firework.”

“Love is hard work.”

“Friendships are an unforseeable burden.”

“existence is humiliation, anyway.”

“To have a child is to be impaled daily on the spike of responsibility.”

“Don't touch me, you fat ghost!”

“We're always sick and we just don't know it. What we mean by health is only when our constant physical deterioration is undetectable.”

“Apparently they died from overfeeding. Apparently I overfed them. Apparently fish are terrible glutons with absolutely no self-control who just don't know when they've had enough and will stuff themselves to death with those innocuous little beige flakes imaginatively labeled 'fish food.”

“Let’s not mince words: the inside of the Sydney casino looks as if Vegas had an illegitimate child with Liberace’s underpants, and that child fell down a staircase and hit its head on the edge of a spade.”

“… she gave me a look that deftly combined tenderness with revulsion. To this day the memory of that look still visits me like a Jehovah’s Witness: uninvited and tireless.”

“Sometimes not talking is effortless, and other times it’s more exhausting than lifting pianos.”

“People carry their secrets in hidden places, not on their faces. They carry suffering on their faces. Also bitterness if there’s room.”

“[I'll teach you] how not to leave the windows of your heart open when it looks like rain and how everyone has a stump where something necessary was amputated. ”

“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.”

“There are men put on this earth to make laws designed to break the spirits of men. There are those put here to have their spirits broken by those put here to break them. Then there are those who are here to break the laws that break the men who break the spirits of other men. I am one of those men. - Harry West”

“We were on our way to the twentieth floor, sharing the elevator with two suits that had men inside them.”

“The moment seemed endless, but it was probably only half that.”

“Losers blame their parents; Failures blame their kids.”

“I think that's the real loss of innocence: the first time you glimpse the boundaries that will limit your potential.”

“As I passed through the gates, the blistered hands of nostalgia gave my heart a good squeeze and I realized you miss shit times as well as good times, because at the end of the day what you're really missing is just time itself. ”

“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 boardrooms or the war rooms either. It starts in the home.”

“Negotiating with memories isn't easy: how to choose between those panting to be told, those still ripening, those already shriveling, and those destined to be mangled by language and come out pulverized?”

“What a nasty act of cruelty, giving a dying man his last wish. Don't you realize he doesn't want it? His real wish is not to die.”

“I was so happy I wanted to fold all the people into paper airplanes and fly them into the lidless eye of that big yellow moon.”

“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.”