Walter Kirn

“She was already dead, but we were starved for followers and stupefied by the elixir of our own heroism, and so we pretended words could resurrect her.”

“I understood that no one lives forever, but there are certain people whose power and presence so thoroughly penetrate your view of things that contemplating their absence feels as strange as imagining having never been born yourself.”

“I'd forgotten this about women: so many conditions. A man shouldn't take them to heart, and yet he does, because he doesn't want to be alone.”

“I still believe in love. I always will. It's my blessing and my burden.”

“This was all our world was made of: decomposed visions. Not atoms --- bits of dreams.”

“His voice sounded more sincere in these surroundings, less distorted by pride and pain.”

“She's everything I wanted when I was young and everything I distrust now that I'm not.”

“They lived in a blurry world, those two, where clear, consistent intentions weren't required.”

“Spirit was a by-product of activity, like the reflection from a spinning fan blade, and our souls in the end did not reside within us but flowed outward from our movements.”

“I just wasn't ready for his stories. They'd breed with the others I'd heard and hatch new monsters, because there was no such thing as separation here, not once you'd started listening. Never listen.”

“Thoughts are thoughts and that's all they are.”

“His thoughts were clearly still shoving him further away, toward some ultimate dark drama that he might or might not have actually lived through but whose telling would let out the pressure inside his skull.”

“Reliving his degradation had struck some spark in him and it was glowing now like a blown-on coal.”

“Other people's devotions embarrassed me, perhaps because, like other people's kisses, they rarely looked genuine when viewed too closely.”

“I sensed that almost all of them knew they didn't have much more time on earth. Maybe this accounted for their willingness to pitch in with strangers and form a neighborhood.”

“For time to pass it would have to go somewhere, and where would that be? Time sits. We move, it sits. Sometimes it trembles slightly, but that's all.”

“Love is a powerful painkiller.”

“The human body is strangely made and sometimes it pays not to think about it too closely.”

“Meanness on request isn't meanness at all, but kindness carried too far.”

“Men who turn their faith into a business owe all of us a steak dinner now and then.”

“The most beautiful faces have some ugly in them.”

“I preferred that my bad dreams be vague.”

“He looked like a being who'd voyaged back through time from a world that had overcome illness, pain, and conflict.”

“Their throat muscles shifted sharply when they spoke, as if separately manufacturing each word.”

“I could see tall ideas standing up behind his eyes.”

“I feel like my head is finally the right size. I feel like it finally fits around my mind.”

“Art, art of any kind, shows that folks are trying.”

“Requesting permission from someone to be honest is really a way of accusing the other person of being so demanding or overbearing that you couldn't be honest all along.”

“endless soaring toy-rocket dreams and schemes that let out a sad, weak 'pop' at their high climax point and then flake apart as they tumble toward some thorn patch that's also a hatching ground for baby snakes”

“Central Wyoming was like hell without the flames, an underworld thrust up onto the surface.”

“Frustration comes from fighting your own momentum.”

“Our habit of wishing backward from what is to what might have been is the soft but persistent tapping that cracks the crystal.”

“Quiet cunning bested boastful brawn”

“Eyewitness News' is a clever plot to convince us that all the important events are happening somewhere else, to other people, at the same time we're literally dying in our beds.”

“They were gray, staring, bottomless, blank, fallen eyes whose pupils played scenes of heaven upside down.”

“Though I no longer liked him or respected him, the thought of his disapproval frightened me.”

“Our faith was a flickering flame.”

“Sometimes, when a person is truly lost in this world, suffocating inside her private bubble where all she can hear is her own droning heartbeat, a touch can be enough.”

“It looked like just the sort of family Americans dream of having: dumb and loving.”

“How soon human beings forget what a privilege it is to live in freedom. A privilege, not an honor. An honor would mean we deserved it. We do not.”

“What was more humiliating, I wondered: having to beg for someone's cold chicken bones or being offered them?”

“Literature had torn Tessa and me apart, or prevented us from merging in the first place. That was its role in the world, I'd started to fear: to conjure up disagreements that didn't matter and inspire people to act on them as though they mattered more than anything. Without literature, humans would all be one. Warfare was simply literature in arms. The pen was the reason man invented the sword.”

“You long for a windfall that will let you quit and pursue your great hobby”

“Just breathing can be such a luxury sometimes.”

“If I had to pick between knowing just a little about a lot of folks and knowing everything about a few, I'd opt for the long, wide-angle shot, I think.”

“We're a telephone family, strung out along the wires, sharing our news in loops and daisy chains. We don't meet face-to-face much, and when we do there's a dematerialized feeling, as though only half of our molecules are present.”

“The lines we draw that make us who we are are potent by virtue of being non-negotiable, and even, at some level, indefensible.”

“To apologize for your personal absolutes, for what Sandy Pinter calls your “Core Attachments,” means apologizing for your very existence.”

“My advice for aspiring writers is go to New York. And if you can’t go to New York, go to the place that represents New York to you, where the standards for writing are high, there are other people who share your dreams, and where you can talk, talk, talk about your interests. Writing books begins in talking about it, like most human projects, and in being close to those who have already done what you propose to do.”

“This is how it works now with the news: the story begins with a moral, then a narrative is fashioned to support it.”