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Steve Toltz

82 quotes

“You never hear about a sportsman losing his sense of smell in a tragic accident, and for good reason; in order for the universe to teach excruciating lessons that we are unable to apply in later life, the sportsman must lose his legs, the philosopher his mind, the painter his eyes, the musician his ears, the chef his tongue.”
Steve Toltz (born 1972) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Most of my life I never worked out whether to pity, ignore, adore, judge, or murder my father. His mystifying behavior left me wavering right up until the end.”
Steve Toltz (born 1972) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“OK, Jasper. Here it is: The world's not falling apart imperceptibly anymore, these days it makes a loud shredding noise! In every city of the world, the smell of hamburgers marches brazenly down the street looking for old friends! In traditional fairy tales, the wicked witch was ugly; in modern ones, she has high cheekbones and silicone implants! People are not mysterious because they never shut up! Belief illuminates the way a blindfold does! Are you listening, Jasper?”
Steve Toltz (born 1972) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“I tell you, it's indescribable the joy children get from watching a fight. It's a blinding Christmas orgasm for a child. And this is human nature undiluted by age and experience! This is mankind fresh out of the box! Whoever says it's life that makes monsters out of people should check out the raw nature of children, a lot of pups who haven't yet had their dose of failure, regret, disappointment, and betrayal but still behave like savage dogs. I have nothing against children, I just wouldn't trust one not to giggle if I accidentally stepped on a land mine.”
Steve Toltz (born 1972) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“And now everyone returning from an armed conflict is called a hero too. In the old days you had to commit specific acts of valor during war; now you just need to turn up. These days when a war is on, heroism seems to mean 'attendance.'”
Steve Toltz (born 1972) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“I had only a splinter of awareness back then that no matter what anybody says, choosing between the available options is not the same as thinking for yourself. The only true way of thinking for yourself is to create options of your own, options that don't exist.”
Steve Toltz (born 1972) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“When people think your days are numbered, they're really very nice to you. It's only when you're trying to get on in the world that they bring their claws out.”
Steve Toltz (born 1972) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Even ugly people know beauty when they don't see it.”
Steve Toltz (born 1972) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“I'd learned a valuable lesson: people almost never look up. Who knows why? Maybe they're looking at the soil for a preview of coming attractions. And so they should. I think anyone who says he looks to the future and doesn't have one eye on the dirt is being short-sighted.”
Steve Toltz (born 1972) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“OK, boys, you heard the man. Get out of here. Come back, though, I've got lots more stuff. And you never know, maybe we can work together one day. Just because I'm in here for life doesn't mean I won't be out one day. Life doesn't really mean life. It's just a figure of speech. It means an eternity which is actually shorter than life, if you know what I mean.”
Steve Toltz (born 1972) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“You experience life alone, you can be as intimate with another as much as you like, but there has to be always a part of you and your existence that is incommunicable; you die alone, the experience is yours alone, you might have a dozen spectators who love you, but your isolation, from birth to death, is never fully penetrated. What if death is the same aloneness, though, for eternity? An incommunicable, cruel, and infinite loneliness. We don't know what death is. Maybe it's that.”
Steve Toltz (born 1972) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“No one listened to me. Caroline and I stood together as they dragged Terry away to a mental asylum. I looked at my parents incredulously, at their inexorably tepid souls. All I could do was uselessly shake a clenched fist and think how people are so eager to become slaves that it's unbelievable. Christ. Sometimes they throw off their freedom so quickly, you'd think it was burning them.”
Steve Toltz (born 1972) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“It's so rare that people give you real, practical advice. Normally they say things like "Don't worry," and "Everything will be OK," which is not only impractical, it's exasperating, and you have to wait until they're diagnosed with a terminal disease before you can say it back to them with any pleasure.”
Steve Toltz (born 1972) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“...What did I have to lose Would they really bother giving me another life sentence? I already have six!" Harry paused here a moment, reflecting, and said quietly, "I'll tell you something, Marty, there's freedom in forever.”
Steve Toltz (born 1972) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“When you withdraw from the world, the world withdraws too, in equal measure. It's a two-step, you and the world. I didn't look for trouble, and it wore me down that none found me. Doing nothing is as tumultuous for me as working on the floor of the New York Stock Exchange on the morning of a market crash. It's how I'm made. Nothing happened to me in three years and it was very, very stressful.”
Steve Toltz (born 1972) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Democracy in crime was turning out no different from democracies everywhere: a sublime idea in theory, soiled by the reality that deep down nobody really believes that all men are created equal.”
Steve Toltz (born 1972) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“It would be easy enough to get my hands on a gun. You only had to open a cupboard at Harry's or plunge your hand deep into the sugar bowl to find a semiautomatic. Of course, I despised guns and all the baggage that went along with them, like bullet wounds and death, but on the other hand, I liked the idea of breaking another one of the Ten Commandments, especially since I didn't honor my father either. They couldn't very well force you to suffer for two eternities, could they?”
Steve Toltz (born 1972) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Let's not beat around the bush: human feelings can be ridiculous. Thinking back to that moment, to how I felt at the realization that my stepfather was slowly murdering me, I did not feel anger. I did not feel outrage. I felt hurt. That's right. That this man who I'd lived with my whole life, the man who married my mother and was for all practical purposes my father, was maliciously poisoning me to death hurt my feelings. Ridiculous!”
Steve Toltz (born 1972) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Confronting your own assassin is a tricky business; you don't want to trigger your own murder just for the sake of getting something off your chest.”
Steve Toltz (born 1972) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“There's almost no situation you can get yourself into when you don't want what the other guy has.”
Steve Toltz (born 1972) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“What is it with these fucking arsonists? I supposed they are less likely to be malignant smudges of evil than just dumb and bored: a deadly combination. And whatever happens in their upbringing, they emerge from adolescence with no sense of empathy whatsoever. These dumb, bored, unempathetic people are all around us. We can't trust anyone to behave himself. We always have to be on the lookout. Here's the case-winning example: it doesn't happen every day, but every now and again, people shit in public swimming pools. That just says it all to me.”
Steve Toltz (born 1972) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“After all, memory may be the only thing on earth we can truly manipulate to serve us, so we don't have to look back at ourselves in the receding past and think, What an arsehole!”
Steve Toltz (born 1972) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Stupid how we think God only hears our thoughts when we address them to him in particular & not when we think our dirty little thoughts in everyday scenarios such as I hope Fred dies soon so I can have his office, it really is much nicer than mine. The meaning of faith is our understanding w/ Creator that he will not eavesdrop on our mid's whisper to itself unless invited.”
Steve Toltz (born 1972) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Pity is the awful lost dazed brother of empathy. Pity doesn't know what to do with itself so it just goes Awwwwwww.”
Steve Toltz (born 1972) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“To have a child is to be impaled daily on the spike of responsibility.”
Steve Toltz (born 1972) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The life force is like a hot potato, and while impure thoughts may make you burn in hell for all eternity once you die, here in life what gets you baked and fried is your inability to act on them.”
Steve Toltz (born 1972) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“People carry their secrets in hidden places, not on their faces. They carry their suffering on their faces. Also bitterness, if there's room.”
Steve Toltz (born 1972) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“This is exactly the kind of thing a single man can do at five-thirty in the morning, I thought - this is exactly why people have wives and husbands and girlfriends and boyfriends, so they don't allow themselves to get too creepy. But leave a man alone for long enough and there is nothing odd he won't do. A life lived alone weakens the mind's immune system, and your brain becomes susceptible to an attack of strange ideas.”
Steve Toltz (born 1972) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Denouncing civilization takes its toll when you continue to exist within it.”
Steve Toltz (born 1972) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“I think that's the real loss of innocence: the first time you glimpse the boundaries that will limit your own potential.”
Steve Toltz (born 1972) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“I have too much free time. Free time makes people think; thinking makes people morbidly self-absorbed; and unless you are watertight and flawless, excessive self-absorption leads to depression. That's why depression is the number-two disease in the world, behind Internet porn eyestrain.”
Steve Toltz (born 1972) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“That's the problem with people who suffer right in your face. They can't so much as scratch their noses without its being poignant.”
Steve Toltz (born 1972) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“At the other end of the packed carriage there was a commotion, and a small crowd formed a circle - bad news for someone. Circles of people always are. Honestly, sometimes I think human beings should be prohibited from forming groups. I'm no fascist, but I wouldn't mind at all if we had to live out our lives in single file.”
Steve Toltz (born 1972) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“She was secretive, like me - not wanting anyone to know her every thought in case he used it against her. I imagined she'd discovered, as I had, that what people want from you is confirmation that you're toeing the line, living by the same rules they are, and that you're not going off on your own or awarding yourself any special privileges.”
Steve Toltz (born 1972) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Whenever I'd heard anyone say "Relationships are work," I'd always scoffed, because I thought relationships should grow wild like untended gardens, but now I knew they were work, and unpaid work too - volunteer work.”
Steve Toltz (born 1972) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The worst thing you can say about someone in a society like ours is that they can't hold down a job. It conjures images of unshaven losers with weak grips watching sadly as the jobs slip free and float away. There's nothing we respect more than work, and there's nothing we denigrate more than the unwillingness to work, and if someone wants to dedicate himself to painting or writing poetry, he'd better be holding down a job at a hamburger restaurant if he knows what's good for him.”
Steve Toltz (born 1972) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“No, why air every ugly, negative, loopy, idiotic thought that floats through the head? That's why when you're standing by the harbor and your lover says, in a tender embrace, "What are you thinking about?" you don't respond, "That I hate people and I wish they'd fall down and never get up." I'm telling you. You just can't say it. I don't know much about women, but I do know that.”
Steve Toltz (born 1972) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“After this incident I got into the bad habit of treating her with courtesy and respect. Courtesy and respect are advisable when addressing a judge right before he sentences you, but in a relationship they signify discomfort.”
Steve Toltz (born 1972) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“You may have all the money in the world, Mr. Hobbs, I thought, you might own the whole universe and its particles thereof, you might gain interest on the stars and reap dividends from the moon, but I'm young and you're old and I have something you don't - a future.”
Steve Toltz (born 1972) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Outside, I broke into tears. What a hassle! Now I'll have to become rich and successful just so she could regret dumping me. That's another thing to do in this short, busy life. Christ. They're adding up.”
Steve Toltz (born 1972) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Anyone with an overactive imagination, in particular a perversely negative one, need never be surprised by anything. The imagination absolutely can catch out imminent disasters as they're warming up, especially if you keep your nostrils open. People who can accurately read the future: are they gifted at seeing or gifted at guessing?”
Steve Toltz (born 1972) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Sometimes I think the human animal doesn't really need food or water to survive, only gossip.”
Steve Toltz (born 1972) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Does anyone go to the grave satisfied? The satisfaction can't exist as long as there's one itch left to scratch. And I don't care who you are, there's always an itch.”
Steve Toltz (born 1972) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“What a nasty act of cruelty, giving a dying man his last wish. Don't you realize he doesn't want it? His real wish is not to die.”
Steve Toltz (born 1972) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“I believe that inequality is not the product of capitalism but the product of the fact that in a group of two men and one woman, one of the men will be taller and will have straighter teeth than the other, and he'll get the woman. Thus I believe that economics isn't the basis of inequality, straight teeth are!”
Steve Toltz (born 1972) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“When democracy works, the government does what the people want. The problem with that is that people want shitty things! People are scared and greedy and self-centered and only concerned about their financial security! Yes, the truth of the matter is THERE HAS YET TO BE A GREAT DEMOCRATIC NATION BECAUSE THERE HAS YET TO BE A GREAT BUNCH OF PEOPLE!”
Steve Toltz (born 1972) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“That's the wonderful thing about democracy: you can hold public office legitimately while still being despised by 49.9 percent of the suspicious eyes on the street.”
Steve Toltz (born 1972) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“I'm telling you, the whole of Australia went crazy. The national obsession became reform. I even think they understood that it wasn't the ideas themselves but the idea of the ideas, the idea that we might as well restlessly innovate and wherever possible obliterate our slavish connection with the past. Why? Because the past is always the worst thing happening to the present at any given time.”
Steve Toltz (born 1972) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“There's nothing like a nostalgia trip to make you feel alien from both your past and your present. You also see what's static in you, what you hadn't the courage or strength to change, and all your old fears, the ones you still carry. The disappointment of your failure is palpable. It's terrible to go around bumping into yourself like that.”
Steve Toltz (born 1972) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Honestly, with all the noise a father makes about demanding respect and obedience, I don't think there can be a father in the world who doesn't, at the bottom of his heart, want a simple thing: for his son to like him.”
Steve Toltz (born 1972) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source