We learn nothing

Quotes!

Once a year on my stabbiversary, I remind myself that this is still my bonus life, a round on the house.

I’ve demonstrated an impressive resilience in the face of valuable life lessons, and the main thing I seem to have learned from this one is that I am capable of learning nothing from almost any experience, no matter how profound.

The goal of a life is not to provide material for good stories.

Anytime I hear about another one of us gone berserk, shooting up his ex’s office or drowning her kids to free herself up for her Internet boyfriend, the question I always ask is not, like every other tongue-clucking pundit in the country, how could this have happened? but why doesn’t this happen every day?

I have loved women who were saner and kinder than me , for whom I became the best version of myself. But it’s also a relief to be with someone who’s not better than you, who’s just as bad and likes it. With these women , I didn’t have to impersonate a better person than myself; we were complicit, accomplices.

I don’t feel middle-aged— I just feel like I’ve been young a lot longer than most people.

Eventually a day comes when the lined, puffy, sagging face you see the mirror when you’re hung over does not go away, and you realize that it is now your actual face.

What someone’s lies reveal about them (aspirations to being an accomplished writer, fantasies of an exotic history and a cosmopolitan family ) are always sadder than the fact of the lies themselves.

The Soul Toupee is that thing about ourselves we are most deeply embarrassed by and like to think we have cunningly concealed from the world, but which is, in fact, pitifully obvious to everybody who knows us.

Most people are just too self-absorbed, well -meaning, and lazy to bother orchestrating Machiavellian plans to slight or insult us.

But outrage is like a lot of other things that feel good but, over time, devour us from the inside out.

We prefer to think of it as a disagreeable but fundamentally healthy reaction to negative stimuli, like pain or nausea, rather than admit that it’s a shameful kick we eagerly indulge again and again, like compulsive masturbation.

What dooms our best efforts to cultivate empathy and compassion is always, of course, other people.

America is, after all, the most powerful military empire in the history of the planet; we spend the equivalent of most countries ’ GNP each year maintaining an armada of battleships the size of cities, a fleet of radar-invisible supersonic bombers, and enough nuclear weapons to denude the entire biosphere of the earth, and still we need to root for ourselves?

I was starting to remember the whole problem now: I hate these fucking people.

The truth is, there are not two kinds of people. There’s only one: the kind that loves to divide up into gangs who hate each other’s guts.

The obvious impossibility of this plan illuminates something about the nature of friendship and its limits; after sixth grade, you simply aren’t allowed to ask questions like, “Okay, Harlan, how come don’t you like me no more?”

he said, “Aw, you’re gonna find happiness, and I’ll be left Ironing the Pants of Despair.” I was touched by how openly he admitted that he didn’t want me to be happy.

The biggest oil reserves on earth have been tapped; no significant new ones are being discovered. The most accessible and chilling analogy I’ve heard is that the situation is like being at a party where there’s only one six-pack, we’ve already drunk four of the six beers, and it’s after closing time.

The last and saddest lesson I learned from him is that most of us are motivated not by reason or even self-interest, but something more like middle school politics. In making up my own mind on the issue of peak oil, the most relevant question turned out to be not Does the evidence support this theory? or even Is Ken trustworthy? but Would I rather live in the peak-oil compound with Ken or die in the food riots with Harold? Harold and I have made our choice, if only by default; we’ve cast our fate with the doomed. He and I have agreed that, while our fellow Americans are looting Costco and we’re barricaded in our favorite Baltimore bar, we’re going to call Ken up and demand: Why didn’t you warn us? It ought to be worth one last laugh. Maybe the vindication of apocalypse will have put him in a mellow and generous enough mood that even Ken will see the funny side.

My policy has always been, when someone asks you if you will travel to Wisconsin to nurse them through sex change surgery, to say yes.

The longer you live, the more involuted and unique all your friendships become, until each is as exotic and alien from the others as creatures on widely divergent evolutionary branches, bearing as much resemblance to one another as a lightning whelk and a gnu.

It’s as if, if we all had to stand still and shut up and turn off our machines for one minute, we’d hear the time passing and just start screaming.