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Max Barry
107 quotes
“That’s a lot of books. Dictionaries?” She nodded. “Are you a student?” “Of life,” she said. People liked this kind of quippery. It caused them to open up. “I just read them for fun.” “Dictionaries?” “Yes.” “That doesn’t sound like fun. That sounds awful.” “Awful used to mean ’full of awe.’ The same meaning as awesome. I learned that from a dictionary.” He blinked. “See?” She said. “Fun.”
“There is no denying you have been making efforts to retrieve it. However, the more time that passes, the more one wonders whether one is witnessing not efforts so much as charades.”
“He remembered the loneliness. The way his body reacted when he woman smiled at him, the surge of desire it evoked to join with her, not merely in a physical sense but beyond that, to confide and be understood. It had been almost overwhelming. Then he discovered God. It had been terribly alarming. The very idea, a poet succumbing to religion! He was shocked at himself. But the feeling was undeniable and grew week by week. He could no longer believe he was alone. He began to see the divine in everything, from the circumvoluted fall of a leaf to the fortuitous arrival of an elevator. Occasionally, when the sterility of his job pressed close, he felt the presence of God like a figure in the room. God was with him. God loved him. It was ridiculous, but there it was. It was a tumor, of course. Oligodendroglioma, a cancerous growth in an area associated with feelings of enlightenment. The feelings it aroused could be reproduced through electrical stimulation. It wasn’t fatal, but it would need to be removed, his surgeon told him,…because it would continue to grow. Over time, there would be less and less of him and more of the tumor. His brain was being eaten by God. He left the clinic in fine spirits. He had no intention of removing the tumor. It was the perfect solution to his dilemma: how to feed his body’s desire for intimacy. He was delusional, of course. There was no higher presence filling him with love, connecting him to all things. It only felt that way. But that was fine. That was ideal. He would not have trusted a God outside his head.”
“It would have corrupted me. It would have been my undoing, as unearned power always is, sooner or later. And I have no intention of wasting this life on temporary greatness.”
“You don’t know me as well as you think.” “Eliot,” said Yeats, “if that were true, you wouldn’t need to say it.”
“I’m founding a religion,” said Yeats. “I use the term religion loosely. But then, so does everyone.”
“Within perfect walls there is nothing worth protecting. There is, in fact, nothing. And so we exchange privacy for intimacy. We gamble with it, hoping that by exposing ourselves, someone will find a way in. This is why the human animal will always be vulnerable: because it wants to be.”