Quotes from book

Haunted

“Without animals, there would be no humanity. In a world of just people, people will mean nothing…”

“Pretty much always. We need to tell the story of our life to someone.”

“Nothing happened, and nothing kept happening.”

“They assume she was once gorgeously beautiful. Because now she looks so—bad.”

“The truth is… you think what people want you to think.”

“To some of us, the nights are too long. To some, the days.”

“The world will always punish the few people with special talents the rest of us don’t recognize as real.”

“Telling a story is how we digest what happens to us," Mr Whittier says, "It's how we digest our lives. Our experiences.”

“Some stories, she'd say, the more you tell them, the faster you use them up. Those kind, the drama burns off, and every version, they sound more silly and flat. The other kind of story, it uses you up. The more you tell it, the stronger it gets. Those kind of stories only remind you how stupid you were. Are. Will always be.”

“The whole idea of men creating perfect robot women for their own pleasure, it happens every day. The most "beautiful" women you see in public, none of them are for real. They're just men perpetuating their perverted stereotypes of women. Just the oldest story in the world. There's a penis on every page of Cosmopolitan magazine if you know where to look.”

“You will always have some excuse not to live your life.”

“For the rest of history, all over the world, people will be trying to save this same dead woman. This woman who just wanted to die.”

“Stink for privacy, the new way to protect personal space. Intimidation by odor.”

“You are permanent, but this life is not," Mr. Whittier would say. "You don't expect to visit an amusement park, then stay forever.”

“Until you can ignore your circumstances, and just do as you promise," he says, "you'll always be controlled by the world.”

“Some stories, Mr. Whitter would say, you tell them and you use them up. Other stories, they use you up. p288”

“What you have to love about drinking is, every swallow is an irrevocable decision. You charging ahead, in control if the game. It’s the same with pills, sedatives and painkillers, every swallow us a first definite step down some road.”

“Her dress, swimsuit-tight, leotard-tight, her pantyhose run with women pedaling bicycles going nowhere at a thousand calories an hour.”

“The earth, he'd say, is just a big machine. A big processing plant. A factory. That's your big answer. The big truth. Think of a rock polisher, one of those drums, goes round and round, rolls twenty-four/seven, full of water and rocks and gravel. Grinding it all up. Round and round. Polishing those ugly rocks into gemstones. That's the earth. Why it goes round. We're the rocks. And what happens to us--the drama and pain and joy and war and sickness and victory and abuse--why, that's just the water and sand to erode us. Grind us down. To polish us up, nice and bright.”