Kristopher Jansma Quotes

Evelyn was followed in by a sour-faced woman with long, glamorous dark hair and a stern-looking gentleman in a tuxedo who looked just like Julian, but with less hair. They both looked as though they might buy the auditorium just to burn it to the ground. Even in this crowd they seemed assuredly a cut above the rest.

We came to the city because we wished to live haphazardly, to reach for only the least realistic of our desires, and to see if we could not learn what our failures had to teach, and not, when we came to live, discover that we had never died. We wanted to dig deep and suck out all the marrow of life, to be overworked and reduced to our last wit. And if our bosses proved mean, why then we'd evoke their whole and genuine meanness afterward over vodka cranberries and small batch bourbons. And if our drinking companions proved to be sublime then we would stagger home at dawn over the Old City cobblestones, into hot showers and clean shirts, and press onward until dusk fell again. For the rest of the world, it seemed to us, had somewhat hastily concluded that it was the chief end of man to thank God it was Friday and pray that Netflix would never forsake them.

Still we lived frantically, like hummingbirds; though our HR departments told us that our commitments were valuable and our feedback was appreciated, our raises would be held back another year. Like gnats we pestered Management - who didn't know how to use the Internet, whose only use for us was to set up Facebook accounts so they could spy on their children, or to sync their iPhones to their Outlooks, or to explain what tweets were and more importantly, why - which even we didn't know. Retire! we wanted to shout. We ha Get out of the way with your big thumbs and your senior moments and your nostalgia for 1976! W

The truth is only slightly less interesting than the story.

Everybody's just got their nose in their own soup. They say they care, but they don't put poems in books for me to read ... They talk to me about 'adjusting my expectations for the world.' And how I need to be realistic and just accept that this is how things work and that life is unfair ... I know, I know, I know.

the world." Jeffrey just shakes his head. "You don't know what it was like. You weren't there when things got really bad. That Haslett asshole kept on calling, and then Iowa, and whenever I went out, there'd be someone just staring at me. It was like I could see my words there in their heads. Crawling there on the undersides of their foreheads. It was like they thought I knew something. And they always ask me, Is it true? Is it true? Did it really happen? And then . . . What's next? What are you working on now? All of these . . . these . . . these - "" (from "The Unchangeable Spots of Leopards: A Novel (Ala Notable Books for Adults)" by Kristopher Jansma)

It was like exactly what it was. It was like a set of claws tearing through my flesh.

He extends a hand, larger than a dinner plate, and I have no choice but to shake it. I think I can feel my metacarpals shattering. Julian jumps to summon our waitress again, mostly to avoid shaking hands with this Goliath. "And a pitcher of mimosas, as soon as humanly possible.

Because no one was special, and no one was immune to tragedy.

Makes you want to fold stories inside of stories inside of stories.

It's all about realizing what you're doing to hold yourself back, like through hatred or fear or nihilism or eating gluten. You identify the things you want, and you finally allow yourself to take them-'

William lost the end of her diatribe as a garbage truck rolled by outside

The idea of it's great," I explain. "But then there's the actual thing of it.

These stories are all true, but only somewhere else.

We'd been bankrupt since we'd left home; we'd secure our own society. Retirement was an afterlife we didn't believe in and that we expected yesterday.

We began to build our castles in the air, hoping sooner or later they'd carry us off. New days came like clockwork without becoming tomorrows. We slept less and less, dipped in darkness through the daytime and heated by burning light in the endless evening. And only when we finally got up, threw on our clothes and walked away, did we realize that we had all been gone for years already.