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| Link | Quote | Stars | Tags | Author |
| 1c369c1 | The rest of us lined up for debugging and muumuus. | Rachel Kushner | ||
| 65a615a | What happens between bodies during an insurrection is more interesting than the insurrection itself. | Rachel Kushner | ||
| d4502c6 | The cause of whose tears... could not be found in the traces on her cheeks. ...even as he knew the source of her tears was endless. bottomless and endless and not to be found in their traces. p.194 | Rachel Kushner | ||
| ec53a9c | people only tend to allow their own contradictions, and not those of others. It was okay to be murky to yourself, to know you weren't an angel, but other people had to be more cleanly divided into good and bad. P.357 | Rachel Kushner | ||
| 3122581 | We loved life more than the future. | mars-club rachel-kushner | Rachel Kushner | |
| 405072e | the point of the film....was about being a woman, about caring an not caring what happens to you. it was about not really caring. p.198 | Rachel Kushner | ||
| 041091f | Through the familiar orbit east of Reno, the brothels and wrecking yards, the big puffing power plant and its cat's cradle of coils and springs and fencing, an occasional freight train and the meandering and summer-shallow Truckee River, railroad tracks and river escorting me to Fernley, where they both cut north. | Rachel Kushner | ||
| 585e5b5 | I come from reckless, unsentimental people. | Rachel Kushner | ||
| 268855b | America was supposed to be a place ruined and homogenized by highways, that that was its unique character, crass and vulgar sameness. | concrete homogenization sameness highways | Rachel Kushner | |
| 63be712 | pretending as they waited that time had no value and what a lie. A lie they didn't mind. They were on the clock, being paid to forsake time's value by standing under the sun like they had all day. | Rachel Kushner | ||
| bf82509 | On that day, nothing could have seemed more romantic to me, no other scenario more like real courtship, than a Chinese movie and a hand job under a coat. | Rachel Kushner | ||
| 78af83b | Enchantment means to want something and also to know, somewhere inside yourself, not an obvious place, that you aren't going to get it. p.71 | Rachel Kushner | ||
| 740abe6 | Certain women were best viewed from the window of a speeding car, the exaggeration of their makeup and their tight clothes. Maybe women were meant to speed past, just a blur. Like China girls. Flash, and then gone. | Rachel Kushner | ||
| ef6c393 | Enchantment means to want something and also to know somewhere inside yourself, not an obvious place, that you aren't going to get it p.71 | Rachel Kushner | ||
| 4c9b28b | The woman senses that time is more purely hers if she squanders it and keeps it empty, holds it, feels it pass by, and resists filling it with anything that might put some too-useful dent in its open, airy emptiness. | Rachel Kushner | ||
| e63becb | To show you the uselessness of the truth," he said." | Rachel Kushner | ||
| 5a65bd6 | You couldn't hate someone who saw the world so differently. | Rachel Kushner | ||
| 4a661eb | She was going to drink after her shift was finished. "That kind of drinking where you make a wilderness and tear a path in. You meet someone else there, deep in the woods. Go home together. Claw your way toward each the through the booze, confusion, misery, horniness." | Rachel Kushner | ||
| f2c835d | P 271 There's a little songbird eaten whole, bones and everything, by French aristocrats. Illegal, and, by custom, enjoyed with a cloth over the face and head, like an executioners's hood. Maybe what we lack is tradition and elegance in our relentless destruction of nature | Rachel Kushner | ||
| d54aa95 | You have time. Meaning don't use it, but pass through time in patience, waiting for something to come. Prepare for its arrival. Don't rush to meet it. Be a conduit. I believed him. I felt this to be true. Some people might consider that passivity but I did not. I considered it living. | Rachel Kushner | ||
| ec834ed | Whimsy is the answer to tears. | sadness reactions tears | Rachel Kushner | |
| ce9ff63 | All the talk of regret. They make you form your life around one thing, the thing you did, and you have to grow yourself from what cannot be undone: they want you to make something from nothing. They make you hate them and yourself. They make it seem that they are the world, and you've betrayed it, them, but the world is so much bigger. The lie of regret and of life gone off the rails. What rails. The life is the rails. It is its own rails a.. | Rachel Kushner | ||
| f61fd63 | I can only know myself, if I can know anyone. I can only judge me. | Rachel Kushner | ||
| cc2e3d3 | change was such an elusive thing. A man could say every day that he wanted to change his life, was going to change it, and every day the lament became merely a part of the life he was already living, so that the esire for change was in fact a kind of stasis that allowed the unchanged life to continue, because at least the man knew to disapprove of it, which reassured him not all was lost. | Rachel Kushner | ||
| 9499915 | change was such an elusive thing. A man could say every day that he wanted to change his life, was going to change it, and every day the lament became merely a part of the life he was already living, so that the desire for change was in fact a kind of stasis that allowed the unchanged life to continue, because at least the man knew to disapprove of it, which reassured him not all was lost. | Rachel Kushner | ||
| a187835 | Charles Bukowski's Factotum | Rachel Kushner | ||
| b99d2cb | Jesus' Son by Denis Johnson. | Rachel Kushner | ||
| cb17282 | I thought of the girl in the photo in Ronnie's studio, the one on layaway. She was probably waiting for him this very moment, somewhere downtown. Checking the clock, applying lipstick, concentrating herself into an arrow pointed at Ronnie. Doing the various things women did when they had to wait for something they wanted. | Rachel Kushner | ||
| f237d59 | S]ympathy for people, without any sympathy for what caused their circumstances, [is] not real sympathy but sentimentality. | Rachel Kushner | ||
| 8ccb595 | We were in separate realities, fast and slow. There is no fixed reality, only objects in contrast. | objectivity objects subjectivity motion speed observation relativity perception | Rachel Kushner | |
| 854030b | Change was such an elusive thing. A man could say every day that he wanted to change his life, was going to change it, and every day the lament became merely a part of the life he was already living, so that the desire for change was in fact a kind of stasis that allowed the unchanged life to continue, because at least the man knew to disapprove of it, which reassured him not all was lost. | Rachel Kushner | ||
| 69f6c22 | Lonzi said the only thing worth loving was what was to come, and since what was to come was unforeseeable---only a cretin or a liar would try to predict the future---the future had to be lived now, in the now, as intensity. | time living love hindsight insight | Rachel Kushner | |
| e4478bb | If there was no imperative, it was not love. | fate love certainty predestined | Rachel Kushner | |
| 4a83bd1 | Seks is geen ruilhandel, het is een schenkeconomie. | Rachel Kushner | ||
| 634afe7 | The Sunset was transformed. The grocery store on Irving was gourmet. A girl I was friends with in high school worked the meat counter. People who looked like frat boys crowded the streets, wearing college sweatshirts and sipping health drinks out of giant Styrofoam containers. They even moved the old post office, which felt like a grievous insult. Everything got converted by money and I started to miss these grim places that offered no happ.. | Rachel Kushner | ||
| f8b7c06 | He understood that this was the overseer's main skill, to recognize what was within human limits, but just barely. "Within, but just barely" was the optimum calibration, the unit of profit." | slavery labor exploitation | Rachel Kushner | |
| 518b5d2 | Silent people can be misleading, suggesting profundity and thoughtfulness where there may be none. | silence wisdom misappropriation deception deep-thoughts | Rachel Kushner | |
| 6d8ce24 | and it is easier to like difficult people when they are leaving, or already gone. | Rachel Kushner | ||
| ee9211d | The three passions," Stanley had said to me that morning, "are love, hate, and ignorance. Ignorance is the strongest." | Rachel Kushner | ||
| ce6cf95 | She knew that it was not smart to address her concerns about money directly, for men despised women who confronted them in this way. She knew that the smart wife, especially one no longer willing to parlay sexual favors, would find a way to bring up matters sweetly, pouring honey all over the problem before showing it to the husband. But she was out of patience. | money-matters women-and-money | Karen Essex | |
| 9d78a7f | Princess of the night, I have come to offer myself to you," you say in French, the language of my homeland. "Come with me." I am trying to look inside you, to foresee your intentions- lust, rape, or ransom- but your beauty clouds my sight. "Why should I go with you, stranger?" I ask, though I am thrilled by the candor of your request and the desire and enthrallment in your eyes. "Because I am yours, whether you wish it or not. You enchanted.. | mina-and-dracula | Karen Essex | |
| 35ab2fc | I sat down to a lavish meal of Irish stew, boiled salad with beets, celery, potatoes doused in cream sauce, haddock and rice, and a long cheeseboard piled with pungent varieties and tasty rolls. I ate with fiendish voraciousness, and slowly, my hunger subsided and my nerves calmed. | mina-harker | Karen Essex | |
| 9427dfe | My dress is of plain forest green wool, but the other girls are wearing beautiful tunics the color of gems- ruby dresses with sapphire mantles and dappled with jewels that dance before me like little insects on fire. My hair is dark as a crow, but theirs is red and gold and even longer than mine. A ray of sun slashes through the turbulent Irish sky, and I see that my friends' perfect skin shimmers in the sun, making them almost translucent. | little-girl mina-harker | Karen Essex | |
| 9349c3d | The room was dark, though weak autumnal light filtered in through arched windows high on the walls, illuminating the room's rich aubergine brocade wallpaper. Its color cast a soft violet haze that floated through the bedroom, twinkling the huge diamond-shaped crystals that dropped from two immense, many-tiered silver chandeliers. They were larger than any I had ever seen, things out of a palace or a fairy tale. An imposing, heavily carved w.. | light chandelier-crystals damask wardrobe mina-harker purple titian | Karen Essex |