“What if in fact there were ever only like two really distinct individual people walking around back there in history’s mist? That all difference descends from this difference? The whole and the partial. The damaged and the intact. The deformed and the paralyzingly beautiful. The insane and the attendant. The hidden and the blindingly open. The performer and the audience. No Zen-type One, always rather Two, one upside-down in a convex lens.” (220)
“She’d lost the ability to lie to herself about being able to quit, or even about enjoying it, still. It no longer delimits and fills the hole. It no longer delimits the hole.” (222)
“the difference between homicide and suicide consisting pehaps only in where you think you discern the cage’s door” (230)
Poor Tony’s withdrawal/seizure scene from 299-306.
“Hal’s brother is technically, Stanford-Binet-wise, slow, the Brandeis C.D.C. found–but not, verifiably not, retarded or cognitively damaged or bradyphrenic, more like refracted, almost, ever so slightly epistemically bent, a pole poked into mental water and just a little off and just taking a little bit longer, in the manner of all refracted things.” (314)
“This appetite to choose death by pleasure if it is available to choose–this appetite of your people unable to choose appetites, this is death. What you call the death, the collapsing: this will be the formality only.” (318)
“When you’d Come In–things would seem to get progressively somehow better, inside, for a while, then worse, then even better, then for a while worse in a way that still somehow better, realer, you feel somehow unblinded, which is good, even though a lot of the things you see about yourself and how you live are horrible to have to see–and by this time the whole thing is so improbable and unparsable that you’re so flummoxed you’re convinced you’re maybe brain-damaged, still, at this point, from all the years of Substances, you figure you’d better Hang In in this Boston AA where older guys who seem to be less damaged–or at least less flummoxed by their damage–will tell you in terse simple imperative clauses exactly what to do, and when and where to do it (though never How or Why); at this point you’ve started to have an almost classic Blind Faith in the older guys, a Blind Faith in them born not of zealotry or even belief but just of a chilled conviction that you have no faith whatsoever left in yourself.” (351)
“part of this new girl Joelle’s pull for Ken Erdedy isn’t just the sexual thing of her body, which he finds made sexier by the way the overlarge blue coffee-stained sweater tries to downplay the body thing without being so hubristic as to try to hide it–sloppy sexiness pulls Erdedy in…” (365)
“The truth will set you free. But not until it’s finished with you.” (389)
“Lyle tells Blott not to let the weight he would pull to himself exceed his own personal weight.” (390)
The Joke premise. (397-8)
“Marathe was able to refresh himself without quite sleeping. It was not a state of fugue or neural relaxation, but a type of detachment…Part of Marathe floated off and hovered somewhere just above him, crossing its legs, nibbling at his consciousness as does a spectator at popcorn.” (418)
Marathe’s mistranslation, calling a child’s teeth “his little fangs”. 
(429)
“They somehow forget to mention that the way it gets better and you get better is through pain. Not around pain or in spite of it.” (446)
“The static, momentumless music as subject instead of environment is somehow terribly disturbing: Hal listened toa few minutes of the stuff and told his brother it sounded like somebody’s mind coming apart right before your ears.” (450)
“…with such a wicked nice multilayer paint job that its black has the bottomless quality of water at night.” (461)
***and there are many more, these were just a few I underlined.
Filed under: Literary Quotes
