Adrian Barnes Quotes

Love a lie. But a real lie, a true lie.

To use the old jailhouse term and not the modern rock and roll one, a punk's question.

There's a natural point in the development of any religion where the prophet becomes first a nuisance and then a positive liability. Just imagine Jesus walking into an evangelical church while the collection plate was being passed around

I said,'What's your problem?' Asshole." There was a question behind his question, and that shadow question was 'Do you want to dance?

Every day is important; each day make us. Even the nothing ones especially those, given how they slit up, slowly burying other, seemingly more momentous, moments beneath their weight. I see that now.

Someone once said that we get more difficult to love with each passing year because, over time, our histories grow so tangled that newcomers can no longer bushwhack their way into the thicketed and overgrown depths of our hearts.

What we can't change has to be a church', Paul. Get it?

In sleep we all die, every one of us, every day. Why wasn't that fact noted more often? When we doze off each night there's never the slightest guarantee that we'll wake the next morning. Every little cat nap is a potential game-ender. So why fear death when we are happy and even eager to make that leap of faith each and every night of our lives?

What we used to blithely call 'wasting time' was actually a euphemism for the tenement architecture of our lives; there wasn't an ounce of waste in a ton of those lost hours. Proof of this could be seen in the fact that even as we imagined we were killing time with movies and phone calls, careers and frozen pizzas, time was slowly but surely killing us. But who knew? It

But as it turns out, love doesn't set us free - love keeps standing outside the jail on an endless candlelight vigil. So love? Yes, love was pain as well. Especially love.

that the reason we know others exist is because when they look at us, we feel looked at. He called the entity that was staring back at us the Other.

And even if I'd wanted to mourn, four or five million were too many to shed tears over. Tears are more personal than that. We don;t read a news story about twenty thousand dead in an earthquake and weep. at best, we sigh and tell the wife. More often, we shrug and go check our Facebook messages.

Hell is time, isn't that obvious? Take your greatest pleasure or your greatest fantasy and let it come continuously true - for a day, a week, a year, a decade. And that's hell.

There was more than safety in Charles' numbers: there was consensus, there was culture, there was reality.

And speaking of Escher, it's worth recording this for posterity: the artists were right, literally right, all along. Beneath what we used to call 'reality' there was always an Escheresque, a Boschian, a Munchian fact - a scuttling Guernicopia of horrors just waiting to be discovered once the civilizational rock was finally overturned.

While my lack of enthusiasm kept the bulk of humanity at arm's length, it almost seemed to attract people like Charles. Maybe it's the fact that we misanthropes don't discriminate - the people hater hates everybody equally. Maybe this sad sack egalitarianism makes the Charleses of the world, used as they are to being dismissed out of hand, feel raised to uncommon heights of social desirability when bathed in its jaundiced glow.

There is a point of obesity where, like it or not, whatever your other personal achievements or qualities, all you are is "the fat man" or "the fat lady", The world is a gawking four-year old.

I think now that if all eight billion of us had just shut off the lights and gone to bed that night and left it alone we'd have all slept and the chalice would have passed us by. But let's be real. Whoever leaves anything alone? Life's a scab, and it's our nature to pick at it until it bleeds.

I could pull off a 'man', but never, quite, a 'dude'.