December 2, 2010

  • Downtown Owl...

    Intriguing quotes from Downtown Owl, by Chuck Klosterman:
    " 'Kids don't learn things anymore,' remarked Marvin Windows, the quietest of the six coffee drinkers. [...] 'They go to school all the time, but they don't listen to anyone and they don't read unless you stick a gun to their chest. All they care about is boom-boom music and computer games. And the teachers don't care. They teachers are just waiting for summer vacation. They're worse than the kids.' " (page44)
    "If people only realized that you don't need someone else to invent your happiness, situations like [pregnancy as a teen] wouldn't happen." (page45)
    "Society is so confused, Mitch thought. Everyone wanted to become the person they were already pretending to be." (page108)
    "More than anything else, the point that 1984 kept ramming home was that Big Brother knew everything about everyone, and everyone just accepted this as part of being alive. No sh*t! How was this remotely different from reality? Everyone in Owl knew Laidlaw had impregnated Tina McAndrew. Everyone. [...] Everyone knew everything. So how was 1984 a dystopia? It seemed ordinary. What was so unusual about everyone knowing all the same things?" (page 111)
    "Being a decent guy was no easier than being a terrible, secretive jacka**. He didn't feel less anxious or more content. He still had responsibilities and pressures. Most of the time, being a normal person was harder than the alternative." (page173)
    Toby Haugen, page186. :o )
    "What I have come to realize is that totally different people are still basically the same." (page224)
    "The middle class does not exist. If you believe you are part of the middle class, it just means you're rich and insecure or poor and misinformed." (page229)
    "Sometimes you think, Hey, maybe there's something else out there. But there really isn't. This is what being alive feels like, you know? The place doesn't matter. You just live." (page257)
    "It's hard being wrong. It's hard being wrong about what you think you can do, and it's hard being wrong about who you are. People who are wrong during particularly important moments inevitably spend the rest of their lives trying to explain how their wrongness was paradoxically correct, or - at the very least - why their wrongness 'felt right at the time,' which is very, very differently from being authentically correct." (page261)

    Good writing, Chuck. I wasn't sure how I felt about you doing fiction, but it was good. Almost as good as Killing Yourself to Live. Almost. That one is at the top, then this one. I need to check out Eating the Dinosaur next. After The How of Happiness.