Joshua Ferris Quotes

Some people would never forget certain people, a few people would remember everyone, and most of us would mostly be forgotten.

I don't know; I haven't heard from Uncle Stuart since the day we drove out to Brooklyn together to talk to Mirav Mendelsohn. I miss him, in a way. He meant so much more to me than I could ever mean to him. You don't get too many people like that. Roy Belisle and Bob Santacroce and Stuart Plotz- any one of them could have been something that was almost everything, if things had worked out just a little differently.

It happened all the time. Maybe someone had a legitimate gripe that deserved airing. Maybe someone had a compliment that shouldn't go unspoken. No one said a thing. So long and stay in touch, that's usually all we said. Take care of yourself, good luck. We said nothing about affection, appreciation, admiration.

Everything was always something, but something - and here was the rub - could never be everything.

Hank Nearly was an avid reader. He arrived early in his brown corduroy coat, with a book taken from the library, copied all the pages on the Xerox machine, and sat at his desk reading what looked passebly like the honest pages of business. He's make it through a three-hundred-page novel every two or three days.

I was already at one remove before the Internet came along. I need another remove? Now I have to spend the time that I'm not doing the thing they're doing reading about them doing it? Streaming the clips of them doing it, commenting on how lucky they are to be doing all those things, liking and digging and bookmarking and posting and tweeting all those things, and feeling more disconnected than ever? Where does this idea of greater connection come from? I've never in my life felt more disconnected. It's like how the rich get richer. The connected get more connected while the disconnected get more disconnected. No thanks man, I can't do it. The world was a sufficient trial, Betsy, before Facebook.

A fun thing to do to let off steam after layoffs began was to go into someone's office and send an email from their computer addressed to the entire agency. It might say something simple like "My name is Shaw-NEE! You are captured, Ha! I poopie I poopie I poopie." People came in in the morning and their reaction was so varied.
Jim Jackers read it and immediately sent out an email that we read, "Obviously someone come into my office last night and compossed an email in my name and sent it out to everyone. I apologise for any inconvenience or offence, although it wasn't my fault, and I would appreciate from whoever did this a public apology. I have read that email five times now and I still don't understand it.

But now, now he needed to let himself rest when it came time to rest, and to move on when it came time to move on, and to do so in the direction of the moving on.

Of course I alienate myself from society. It's the only way I know of not being constantly reminded of all the ways I'm alienated from society.

We found ourselves wanting to hurry time along, which was not in the long run good for our health. Everybody was trapped in this contradiction but nobody ever dared to articulate it.

There was so much unpleasantness in the workaday world. The last thing you ever wanted to do at night was go home and do the dishes. And just the idea that part of the weekend had to be dedicated to getting the oil changed and doing the laundry was enough to make those of us still full from lunch want to lie down in the hallway and force anyone dumb enough to remain committed to walk around us. It might not be so bad. They could drop food down to us, or if that was not possible, crumbs from their PowerBars and bags of microwave popcorn surely would end up within an arm's length sooner or later. The cleaning crews, needing to vacuum, would inevitably turn us on our sides, preventing bedsores, and we would make little toys out of runs in the carpet, which, in moments of extreme regression, we might suck on for comfort.

I think it's a very bad idea for someone to start writing for a readership.

Things Could Be Worse And Things Could Be So Much Better - that became the game, my running commentary on the streets of Manhattan, and I played it as well as the other slobs just trying to get by.

Baseball is the slow creation of something beautiful. It is the almost boringly paced accumulation of what seems slight or incidental into an opera of bracing suspense. The game will threaten never to end, until suddenly it forces you to marvel at how it came to be where it is and to wonder at how far it might go. It's the drowsy metamorphosis of the dull into the indescribable.

I wished it had turned out differently. I wished I had been better all around. I wished above all that when I believed something, like that I was finally over her, that I knew myself even the slightest bit.

They were like two inviolable spheres touching at a fine point in their curves, touching but failing to penetrate, failing to breathe the other's air.

Catholics speak, like baseball players, in the coded language of gesture. Sure, the Roman Catholic Church is an abomination to man and a disgrace to God, but it comes with a highly structured Mass, several sacred pilgrimages, the oldest songs, the most impressive architecture, and a whole bunch of things to do whenever you enter the church. Taken all together, they make you one with your brother.

Once again it occurred to me that so many of the things I could do in New York involved eating and drinking. Had we been placed here on earth to do nothing more than eat and drink?

Everyone knew that Jim's creative coup d'etat came from a suggestion from his great-uncle Max, who lived on a farm in Iowa. According to Jim [Jackers], his uncle had Mexicans running the farm while his days were spent in the farmhouse basement reconstructing a real train car from scratch, which was the only thing he had shown any interest in since the passing of his wife. He traveled to old train yards collecting the parts. When someone asked him at a family function why we was doing it, his answer was so that no one could remove the train car from the basement after he died. When it was pointed out to him that the boxcar could be removed by dismantling it, reversing the process by which he had constructed it, Jim's great uncle replied that no Jackers alive was willing to work that hard at anything.

Aren't you capable of finding anything beautiful in the world?" I'd tell her, she'd say, "I do not want to know about those websites. Please keep those disgusting websites to yourself.

The long matrimonial haul was accomplished in cycles. One cycle of bad breath, one cycle of renewed desire, a third cycle of breakdown and small avoidances, still another of plays and dinners that spurred a conversation between them late at night that reminded her of their like minds and the pleasure they took in each other's talk. And then back to hating him for not taking out the garbage on Wednesday. That was the struggle. Sickness and death, caretaking, the martyrdom of matrimony
that was fluff stuff. When the vows kick in, you don't even blink. You just do. She had to be up for it.

The funny thing about work itself, it was so bearable. The dreariest task was perfectly bearable. It presented challenges to overcome, the distraction provided by a sense of urgency, and the things made work utterly, even harmoniously bearable.

If in large part we were concerned only with making it through another day without getting laid off, there was a smaller part just hoping to leave for the night without contributing to someone's lifetime of hurt.

Without work, so much of one's identity just evaporates.

A multifaceted writer, very easy on the surface to pin down but incredibly difficult once you actually read him with any depth.

I know what to do with my life. I just don't know what to do with this one night.

To conform is to lose your soul

People have all this resentment against their parents for fucking them up, but they never realize, the minute they have a kid, that they cease being the child so fondly victimized in their hearts and start being the benighted perpetrators of unfathomable pain.

Why not just go with it? Just walk the dog and send the tweets and eat the scones and play with the hamsters and ride the bicycles and watch the sunsets and stream the movies and never worry about any of it? I didn't know it could be that easy. I didn't know that until just now. That sounds good to me. I think I might be able to do that. Who couldn't do that? It would take somebody mentally ill not to do that, and I'm not mentally ill.

But I did like looking at her. It was harder now, knowing all the ways she sucked, but she was still gorgeous.

This is really what you want? To live with a poet?" "Yes," she said. "With the hot plate? And the lice?

Everyone desires relationships and community. Most people want to belong to a cohesive, like-minded group. It staves off loneliness. It promotes identity. These are natural and very human instincts.

She had the conviction of the newly converted, which wouldn't last forever, but would for the moment brook no discouragement or allow for second-guessing.

Freedom of religion in America is all fine and good until you start believing in nothing, and then it is a crime to be punished.' " "Is

It wasn't as absurd a notion as it might sound. Some days, time passed way too slowly here, other days far too quickly, so that what happened in the morning could seem like eons ago while what took place six months earlier was as fresh in our minds as if an hour had yet to pass. It was only natural that on occasion we confused the two.

Her internalization of Catholicism and its institutional disappointments suited a dental office perfectly, where guilt was often our last resort for motivating the masses.

It is really irritating to work with irritating people

If you hate the Yankees so much," Connie asked me, "why did you move to New York?" "To find out what kind of city could make a monster like a Yankees fan.

After I left college I thought, very naively, that either you became someone interesting - an artist - or you went into academia. If you ended up in an office you were dull and lacking. And I ended up in an office.

It is forgivable to say nothing out of ignorance; it's inexcusable to remain silent once awareness dawns.

We'd seen firsthand how the man handled a crisis. If Marcia decided suddenly to brandish a stapler in a half-threatening manner, he'd fumble with his Motorola and forget his name.

Under "Activities and Interests," it was written "Boston Red Sox." The Boston Red Sox, an activity and an interest. Not a devotion to be suffered. Not a solemn vow in the off-season. Not a memorial to a dead man. Not a calling beyond reason. Just an interest. I take an interest in when they play, whether home or away, whether they win or lose
things like that. Maybe read about it in the paper the next morning. Millions of others just like me, taking an interest. Not "Coronaries and Rehabilitations." Not "Dedications and Forfeitures." Not "Life and Death." "Activities and Interests." This was how it was presented, in terrifying simplicity. What it was all reduced to, the thirty years, and the stupid tears, and every extra inning. An activity and an interest.

If you can get by with quotes from The Godfather and nothing you say matters, that's pretty bleak, don't you think? Don't we want what we say to matter?

I have never stopped considering not becoming a writer.

He stood just inside the door and took stock. Everything in it had been taken for granted. How had that happened again? He had promised himself not to take anything for granted and now he couldn't recall the moment that promise had given way to the everyday. It was not likely one single moment.

Using a wide variety of media, we could demonstrate for our fellow Americans their anxieties, desires, insufficiencies, and frustrations
and how to assuage them all. We informed you in six seconds that you needed something you didn't know you lacked. We made you want anything that anyone willing to pay us wanted you to want. We were hired guns of the human soul. We pulled the strings on the people across the land and by god they got to their feet and they danced for us.

Unless by some miracle, he got up from the chair and changed his life. Unless some store of character revealed itself, and with a little guidance from me, he returned in six months a new man. But even then, I thought, that change, that character, would have to be in him already. I was never going to manufacture it with a few stern warnings - God knows I'd tried - and pain forgets within the hour what it learns in an instant.

Some days felt longer than other days. Some days felt like two whole days. Unfortunately those days were never weekend days. Our Saturdays and Sundays passed in half the time of a normal workday. In other words, some weeks it felt like we worked ten straight days and had only one day off.

The main questions of everyday life are too enormous to answer in any definitive sense.

Without monstrous distortions, I was slowly learning, without lies and hypocrisy, one cannot have the idealized American life I so longed for. Perfection was marred only by those corruptions necessary to its enterprise.

We had visceral, rich memories of dull, interminable hours. Then a day would pass in perfect harmony with our projects, our family members, and our coworkers, and we couldn't believe we were getting paid for this.

Names generate meaning in a short amount of space - they provoke thoughts, questions. That's something I like doing. Of course, you have to be careful. Sometimes it can alienate the reader, it can be another level of mediation, to make a character carry the great burden of a metaphoric name. The character can be a device before he or she becomes a person, and that can be a bad thing for a writer who wants to offer up a kind of emotional proximity in the work. It's a constant struggle, the desire to be playful and the desire to communicate on some very stark emotional level.

My first job is to write a book that I believe is compelling and deserves the long sustained attention that any novel requires, and to worry about the commerce only late in the game.

Mrs. Convoy leaned into the desk, flattening her knuckles on it like a linebacker bracing against the hard earth, and with eyeballs floating above her bifocals asked why I felt it necessary to sit in my own waiting room during peak hours. I told her, she said, "And how is the 'complete experience'?" I told her, she said, "And do you think the 'complete experience' might be enhanced by a dentist who tends to his patients in a timely manner?" I told her, she said, "We will not get a reputation for being a drill-and-bill shop just because you tend to patients in a timely manner. Jesus Mary and Joseph," she said. "Sometimes I think we all work for Toots the Clown.

I never did anything on game night, even though I recorded the games and could always watch them later, because those nights were sacrosanct, and if I gave up the one sacrosanct thing, where would I be and what would I have?

I don't write directly on to the computer because I don't think well facing forward with fingers on a keyboard. I think better looking down holding a pen. And the concentration quotient of pen and paper is higher than when I'm moving words around on screen.

All broken hearts are circumstantial. Every lovelorn jerk is the victim of bad timing, good intentions, and someone else's poor decision making.

She no longer lived in a world of speculation or recall and would take nothing on faith when the facts were but a few clicks away. It drove me nuts. I was sick to death of having as my dinner companions Wikipedia, About.com, IMDb, the Zagat guide, Time out New York, a hundred Tumblrs, the New York Times, and People magazine. Was there not some strange forgotten pleasure in reveling in our ignorance? Would we just be wrong?

I had never thought much of genealogy. A lot of wasted time collecting the names of the dead. Then stringing those names, like skulls upon a wire, into an entirely private and thus irrelevant narrative, lacking any historical significance. The narcissistic pastime of nostalgic bores.

Every time you hear someone read your book and liked your book, you're never sure whether that's going to follow with a similar remark from someone else. Perhaps I have low expectations, but whenever I hear someone say, 'I liked your book,' I don't know if it's going to happen again.

We all knew there was a good deal of pointlessness to nearly all the meetings and in fact one meeting out of every three or four was nearly perfectly without gain or purpose but many meetings revealed the one thing that was necessary and so we attended them and afterward we thanked each other.

I've tried reading the Bible. I never make it past all the talk about the firmament. The firmament is the thing, on Day 1 or 2, that divides the waters from the waters. Here you have the firmament. Next to the firmament, the waters. Stay with the waters long enough, presumably you hit another stretch of firmament. I can't say for sure: at the first mention of the firmament, I start bleeding tears of terminal boredom. I grow restless. I flick ahead. It appears to go like this: firmament, superlong middle part, Jesus. You could spend half your life reading about the barren wives and the kindled wraths and all the rest of it before you got to the do-unto-others part, which as I understand it is the high-water mark.

It was madness to leave without your useless shit. You came in with it, you left with it
that was how it worked. What would you use to clutter a new office with if not your useless shit? We could remember Old Brizz with this box of useless shit, shifting the box from arm to arm as he talked with the building guy. Of course, Old Brizz never had an office again. His useless shit really was useless. He had cause to leave his useless shit behind. But his was a rare case. All things considered, it was better to take your useless shit with you.

Our moral foundation is built on the fundamental law that God (if there is a God, which there is not) would not wish to be worshipped in the perverted and misconceived ways of human beings, with their righteous violence and prejudices and hypocrisies. Doubt, or cease being moral.

We suffered failures of imagination just like everyone else, our daring was wanting, and our daily contentment too nearly adequate for us to give it up.

I would really like that, Betsy, to cheer and jeer and hoot and root alongside a band of brothers. I would love that. But do you have any idea how much attention you have to pay to a Red Sox game? Even a regular-season Red Sox game?

I believe people think as a group more often than we might realize or care to admit. We like to believe that we act as individuals and nothing more, but time and again - in corporations and business, in politics and religion, in fashion and culture, and in friendships and social circles - we think and do as one.

Because of God, even the imperious ballbreakers, moralizing windbags, and meddling assholes may know love.

Why shouldn't it be that way for the rest of us? Why not just go with it? Just walk the dog and send the tweets and eat the scones and play with the hamsters and ride the bicycles and watch the sunsets and stream the movies and never worry about any of it? I didn't know it could be that easy. I didn't know that until just now. That sounds good to me.

I content myself with the fact that the general system of our trade is a system of selfishness, is not dictated by the high sentiments of human nature much less by the sentiments of love and heroism but is a system of distrust not of giving, but of taking advantage.