Chris Adrian Quotes

Maybe I'm too crazy to be in a relationship," Henry said, which was his familiar response to Bobby's familiar discourse about the future. It felt like a grown-up thing to say, and like a difficult concession, and what he meant by it was I am trying as hard as I can and it's not enough for you or even Why can't my weak eccentricities be adorable to you, as yours are to me? But Bobby always heard it as a conversation stopper, childish and easy and glib.

He never got a really proper look at them, but the situation told him it must be a swarming flock of vaginas that flew all around his head, biting him toothlessly on his ears and his cheeks and his neck.

I wanted to tell you that I was so sad I felt as if I might be happy, or in love, simply because such powerful feelings can appear the same to the naive. I was mighty with grief, and I thought I should be empowered by it. I thought my hands should shine with a yellow light, and that should I reach out to touch our mother on the head, I would call her back from the place she'd gone.

But as surely as the moon rises and the sun sets, depravity passes down through the ages, because there is always a gap between who we are and who we should be, and our parents, molested by regret, conceive us under the false hope that we will be better than them, and everything they do, every hug and blow, only makes certain that we never will be.

Shakespeare shows you what it is possible to do in English as a writer - but also shows you that you might as well give up. As it's all been done before and hundreds of years ago. So I have had that long-standing relationship of oppression and inspiration.

He went through rooms he named as he discovered them, and which he hardly had time to appreciate before he'd flung open a door at the far end and plunged through ... and in the Library of All the Same Book he actually stopped to examine a few of the volumes, all titled Various, that lined the shelves.

After a few drinks, my mom would recite her lines as Portia in 'The Merchant of Venice' from her high school play. But I first discovered Shakespeare properly when I was about five. I used to look for the most complicated books I could find and pretend to be reading them. I wanted people to think I was smart.

I shall not weep for any of them, nor regret their fate, nor shake one feather in sympathy.

I want to be a good creature for reasons beyond sharing a life with a good man.

It takes four angels to oversee an apocalypse: a recorder to make the book that would be scripture in the new world; a preserver to comfort and save those selected to be the first generation; an accuser to remind them why they suffer; and a destroyer to revoke the promise of survival and redemption, and to teach them the awful truth about furious sheltering grace.

We are so lucky to live here, he would say, and she couldn't disagree. They were lucky that the earth had conspired to heap up such startling beauty in one place, and they were lucky that it hadn't all fallen apart yet in a a geological catastrophe.

It was something he would figure out only after Bobby dumped him: that his imagination was what made the real world, and real people, only barely palatable for him.

If I showed you what was in my heart," she said, "it would burn you to a cinder.
"I've tried to burn you similarly," it said, "but you never even noticed when I opened my chest.

I am ... sad and angry. Why is my spirit so sad and angry? I look back at my life and all I can remember is rage and rage and rage.

I worry that we all just sat around, after a while, trying to enjoy a ride that was never meant to be fun.

If there's a magic pony in the story, chances are I'll read it.

The stories that engaged me as a kid were all science fiction. Later, it turned out that I didn't have the language to talk about what was bothering me in a way that was straightforward.

I was told by my mother at the age of five that I was going to be a doctor, and that was the end of the conversation. I was presented with a toy stethoscope and told to learn how to use it.

The knowledge of my depravity is the only thing that makes me special ... that I have always always always known, and have never for a moment been able to forget, that there is something terribly wrong with me.