David Burr Gerrard Quotes

To talk about something is the first step toward invading it.

The things white men failed to notice would fill the world they had ruined ten thousand times over.

See," Miranda said, "this is the truth." Sitting in class one morning, I found her pubic hair in my teeth.

The twentieth will be a short century," he said. "Either we or the Soviets will launch the missiles before long, and all the lies will be burned away.

You could fling open every closet of regret and desire in yourself and the people you loved, and still there would be one closet you missed, and crouched in that closet, never to see the dark of day, would be your most crucial self.

Journalists of late seem too eager to change the world in various ways; the point is to describe it, accurately and carefully.

Arthur, do you think the fall of the Wall means anything? Do you think that this means that even one fewer body will burn?

Once you've gotten used to a certain kind of smell from a certain kind of flesh, whether it's a lover or a rotting corpse, you long for it when it's not around. Or maybe it's just me.

Don't you wonder sometimes," Miranda asked, "whether women have all the power or no power at all?

That was what maturity was: accepting things. The more things you accepted, the more mature you were.

I had always thought that vaginas, with their flaps and folds, looked somehow unfinished.

That's what nobody admits about men, how needy they are.

All nineteen-year-old males are children who are men capable of war.

Subtle! Subtlety is bourgeois. Brecht us that when he popped drama's cherry. He fucked drama until it stopped being subtle, like a lady, and started being useful, like a whore.

I'm saying that figuring out what's important in life and how to go about getting it is very difficult. Sometimes you get confused and you get tempted to just let other people make the rules. And some people are really happy to make the rules for other people. Adam Lyons, the man who runs the epiphany machine, is one of those people.

Human beings are terrible things, Arthur.

Men do everything that men do, from waging war to reading books, for one purpose only: to get laid.

I think that we were both wrong. I think that Arthur had sex with his sister to create a short century."
"Daddy, what are you talking about?"
"He was trying to end something, and by ending it start something totally new.

Genocide, as many have noted, is a form of community-building.

You already know what the machine will write on your arm. That lie you've been telling yourself - you know what it is. That blind spot is not really a blind spot - you're choosing to look away. Perhaps more to the point, you already know whether you want to see it. You already know whether you're going to use the machine. So why are you still reading this?

Thinking, like other drugs, can be a useful distraction from pain, as long as it's managed and doesn't become an addiction.

He says that politics is a waste of time. Politics are? Politics is? Anyway, a waste of time. He says you should focus on your own sexual gratification.

Christianity has always been the Gestapo of desire, since long, long before there was a Gestapo. Instead of Jews to hate, Christianity has desire. Though I guess Christianity has Jews, too. In any case, all the ovens in the world can't incinerate desire.