|
0515d1a
|
On any given day in Spokane, Washington, there are more adult men per capita riding children's BMX bikes than in any other city in the world.
|
|
|
Jess Walter |
|
6a00dc4
|
These are the ruins of our memories, which loom in our minds like the Parthenon, even as they are decayed and weathered by time and regret.
|
|
|
Jess Walter |
|
5890b90
|
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."
|
|
humor
routine
|
Jess Walter |
|
7d65feb
|
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?
|
|
my-religion
truth
|
Jess Walter |
|
8a647f5
|
He was ready to stop trying to matter; he was ready to simply live.
|
|
|
Jess Walter |
|
3af1563
|
We want what we want--we love who we love.
|
|
|
Jess Walter |
|
982f971
|
Pasquale's eyes felt heavy and he thought it might be the most intimate thing possible, to fall asleep next to someone in the afternoon
|
|
|
Jess Walter |
|
134576b
|
It was odd and intimate, their hands connected, their heads in different rooms. They could talk. They could hold hands. But they couldn't see each other's faces.
|
|
|
Jess Walter |
|
9ea5dea
|
Claire happy to no longer expect...but embrace the sweet lovely mess that is real life.
|
|
|
Jess Walter |
|
a10d3f3
|
Being alive isn't the same thing as living
|
|
|
Jess Walter |
|
113ca4f
|
He was part of a ruined generation of young men coddled by their parents -by their mothers especially- raised on unearned self-esteem, in a bubble of overaffection, in a sad incubator of phony achievement.
|
|
|
Jess Walter |
|
8691a8b
|
the more you lived the more regret and longing you suffered, that life was a glorious catastrophe
|
|
|
Jess Walter |
|
e79d044
|
met the owner of this cozy book-and-candle Apt. G, a tall, leggy, striking girl named Bea or maybe just the letter B or maybe the insect Bee, not sure, her long blond hair pulled in a ponytail, her no-doubt banging body effortlessly buried beneath a pile of tights and sweaters and scarves - she is a walking coat rack - and as we shook hands, Bea fixed me with the most alarming blue-eyed stare of my life, the kind of stare in which you think..
|
|
drugs
humor
|
Jess Walter |
|
8406402
|
But aren't all great quests folly? El Dorado and the Fountain of Youth and the search for intelligent life in the cosmos-- we know what's out there. It's what isn't that truly compels us.
|
|
jess-walter
quests
|
Jess Walter |
|
824076a
|
I don't know what I expected - no maybe I do, Al Pacino from Scarface- but this drug dealer is more like Al Pacino at the beginning of The Godfather reasonably bemused, untouched by his criminal world, sitting with Diane Keaton whispering about Luca Brazzi, not yet asleep with the fishes, or like Al Pacino from Glengarry Glen Ross, although actually, now that I think about it, he's not like Al Pacino at all but more like Kevin Sp..
|
|
drugs
godfather
humor
kevin-spacey
scarface
|
Jess Walter |
|
5457048
|
I don't think you put the swear word in the right place, Grandpa," Teddy says. When Dad first came here, my boys would look shocked whenever Dad went Old-Faithful-profane, and I began to wonder if Lisa and I shouldn't swear more so Franklin and Teddy weren't so put off by curse words."
|
|
swearing
|
Jess Walter |
|
6f22d15
|
In the kitchen Valeria was making breakfast, his aunt never made breakfast even though Carlo insisted for years that a hotel hoping to cater to French and Americans must offer breakfast. "It's a lazy man's meal.", she always said. "What laggard expects to eat before doing any work?"
|
|
italy
lazy
|
Jess Walter |
|
c838210
|
And Pasquale forced himself to look away from her then. It was like prying a magnet off steel, but he did it: he turned forward in the boat, closed his eyes, still seeing her standing there in his memory. He shook with the strain of not looking back until they rounded the breakwater into the open sea and Pasquale exhaled, his head falling to his chest. "You are a strange young man," Tomasso the Communist said."
|
|
|
Jess Walter |
|
c6572a3
|
Rather, he found himself inhabiting the vast, empty plateau where most people live, between boredom and contentment.
|
|
|
Jess Walter |
|
192cdae
|
Whole worlds exist beneath the surface. And maybe you can't see down there, Michael thought, but there's a part of you that knows.
|
|
|
Jess Walter |
|
7dae773
|
You don't really want my side of the story. You don't want to understand me, know me, to crawl inside of my head. You don't want to feel the things I've felt. You just want to know that one thing: why. Fine. Here's why: Her. I did it all for her.
|
|
|
Jess Walter |
|
44c2216
|
My dreams tend to be either so obscure as to seem random, or so obviously connected to my subconscious that it's embarrassing- as if even my hidden depths lack depth.
|
|
insecurity
jess-walter
|
Jess Walter |
|
cb7f97b
|
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.
|
|
|
Jess Walter |
|
00ef6ff
|
This is a love story, Michael Deane says. But, really, what isn't? Doesn't the detective love the mystery, or the chase, or the nosy female reporter, who is even now being held against her wishes at an empty warehouse on the waterfront? Surely the serial murderer loves his victims, and the spy loves his gadgets or his country or the exotic counterspy. The ice trucker is torn between his love for ice and truck, and the competing chefs go cr..
|
|
|
Jess Walter |
|
87b11f4
|
And he waited--as he always had--for life to come and find him.
|
|
|
Jess Walter |
|
6ace836
|
She was asleep, that blond hair swirled like butter on the pillow beneath her
|
|
|
Jess Walter |
|
9f1342c
|
Use beautiful to describe a sandwich, and the word means nothing.
|
|
|
Jess Walter |
|
f1dbcc2
|
Don't ever say that after sex, do you understand? If you feel the urge to say it, go see the girl first thing in the morning, with her night breath and no makeup...watch her on the toilet...listen to her with her friends...go meet her hairy mother and her shrill friends...and if you still feel the need to say such a stupid thing, then God help you.
|
|
|
Jess Walter |
|
48527d3
|
Make them want to give you the thing you're taking.
|
|
|
Jess Walter |
|
cbd2b9b
|
erhaps it was the difference in age between the countries--America with its expansive youth, building all those drive-in movie theaters and cowboy restaurants; Italians living in endless contraction, in the artifacts of generations, in the bones of empires.
|
|
cowboys
empires
italy
|
Jess Walter |
|
fcbe07c
|
Listen," Richard says, ,,unless you're about to inherit some money, what we're talking about here is irreversible, fatal. You have fiscal Ebola, Matt. You are bleeding out through your nose and your mouth and your eye sockets, from your financial asshole." See! Fiscal Ebola? My financial asshole is bleeding? This was exactly why I started poetfolio.com; there are money poets everywhere."
|
|
humor
|
Jess Walter |
|
14905aa
|
the smaller the space between your desire and what is right, the happier you will be.
|
|
|
Jess Walter |
|
ba7e41b
|
Then we'll make a deal, you and me. We'll do and say exactly what we mean. And to hell with what anyone thinks about it. If we want to smoke, we'll smoke, if we want to swear, we'll swear. How does that sound?
|
|
|
Jess Walter |
|
d8a00f7
|
Your parents don't get to tell your story. Your sisters don't. When he's old enough, even Pat doesn't get to tell your story. I'm your husband and I don't even get to tell it. So I don't care how lovesick this director is, he doesn't tell it. ... No one gets to tell you what your life means!" ~Alvis"
|
|
|
Jess Walter |
|
77e108f
|
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.
|
|
fear
fucking-up
regret
|
Jess Walter |
|
9ec69b8
|
Among the world's evils--fascism, ethnic cleansing, environmental degradation--smoking deserves the most severe curricular attention in my kids' school.
|
|
|
Jess Walter |
|
2e18ea5
|
Ideas are sphincters. Every asshole has one.
|
|
|
Jess Walter |
|
5868fb0
|
And I wonder if we don't live like water seeking a level a low bed until one day we just go dry. I wonder if a creek ever realizes it has made its own grave.
|
|
|
Jess Walter |
|
5c6ddb8
|
A hole opened up and he had to know what was inside it. So he picked and picked until the hole was huge, and then everything sort of... fell in, him, his wife, his kid, and this fragile life they'd built at the edge of this hole. And that's why he was here, because he'd begun wondering if maybe his father hadn't fallen in the same hole -
|
|
|
Jess Walter |
|
069b9db
|
He wondered if the German girl ever knew that someone had loved her so much that he painted her twice on the cold cement wall of a machine-gun pillbox.
|
|
|
Jess Walter |
|
a9454e7
|
Great fiction tells unknown truths. Great film goes further. Great film improves Truth. After all, what Truth ever made $40 million in its first weekend of wide release?
|
|
|
Jess Walter |
|
818bab3
|
Bit yells, Homeless Hungry? Dude, I invented Homeless Hungry. The kid just waves.
|
|
|
Jess Walter |
|
139bd2f
|
Stories are nations, empires.
|
|
|
Jess Walter |
|
32cff0c
|
Stories are people. I'm a story, you're a story . . . your father is a story. Our stories go in every direction, but sometimes, if we're lucky, our stories join into one, and for a while, we're less alone.
|
|
|
Jess Walter |