I don’t normally go back to the book after having seen the movie, but this was one of those occasions. I was compelled to do that, especially after reading some of the quotes from the book. And here’s mine:
You’re painfully alive in a drugged and dying culture.
Being alone has nothing to do with how many people are around.
If you wanted to do something absolutely honest, something true, it always turned out to be a thing that had to be done alone.
It’s a disease. Nobody thinks or feels or cares anymore; nobody gets excited or believes in anything except their own comfortable little God damn mediocrity.
No one forgets the truth; they just get better at lying.
I still had this idea that there was a whole world of marvelous golden people somewhere, as far ahead of me as the seniors at Rye when I was in the sixth grade; people who knew everything instinctively, who made their lives work out the way they wanted without even trying, who never had to make the best of a bad job because it never occurred to them to do anything less than perfectly the first time. Sort of heroic super-people, all of them beautiful and witty and calm and kind, and I always imagined that when I did find them, I’d suddenly know that I Belonged among them, that I was one of them, that I’d been meant to be one of them all along, and everything in the meantime had been a mistake; and they’d know it too. I’d be like the ugly duckling among the swans.
Are artists and writers the only people entitled to lives of their own?
Now you’ve said it. The hopeless emptiness. Hell, plenty of people are on to the emptiness part; out where I used to work, on the Coast, that’s all we ever talked about. We’d sit around talking about emptiness all night. Nobody ever said ‘hopeless,’ though; that’s where we’d chicken out. Because maybe it does take a certain amount of guts to see the emptiness, but it takes a whole hell of a lot more to see the hopelessness. And I guess when you do see hopelessness, that’s when there’s nothing to do but take off. If you can.
You want to play house, you got to have a job. You want to play very nice house, very sweet house, then you got to have a job you don’t like. Great. This is the way ninety-eight-point-nine per cent of the people work things out, so believe me, buddy, you’ve got nothing to apologize for.
The hell with “love” anyway, and with every other phony, time-wasting, half-assed emotion in the world.
Ayshim's BookJournal 