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41 " The important matter of small-town hair p.17 "
― Rachel Kushner , The Flamethrowers
42 " Enchantment means to want something and also to know, somewhere inside yourself, not an obvious place, that you aren’t going to get it. "
43 " All you can do is involve yourself totally in your own life, your own moment, Lonzi said. "
44 " I was in an acute case of the present tense. P.30 "
45 " Most unexpected was the sadness that followed on the heels of pleasure, like smoke from an extinguished candle. "
46 " It was only a motorcycle but it felt like a mode of being. "
47 " I should get one of those T-shirts that says ORGASM DONOR,” he said. "
48 " When the revolution comes it won’t make any difference,” Gloria said. “They’ll have a special guillotine for girls like that. With an even rustier blade for the artists who ogle her. "
49 " What happens between bodies during an insurrection is more interesting than the insurrection itself. "
50 " The cause of whose tears... could not be found in the traces on her cheeks. ...even as he knew the source of her tears was endless. bottomless and endless and not to be found in their traces. p.194 "
51 " ...people only tend to allow their own contradictions, and not those of others. It was okay to be murky to yourself, to know you weren't an angel, but other people had to be more cleanly divided into good and bad. P.357 "
52 " Through the familiar orbit east of Reno, the brothels and wrecking yards, the big puffing power plant and its cat’s cradle of coils and springs and fencing, an occasional freight train and the meandering and summer-shallow Truckee River, railroad tracks and river escorting me to Fernley, where they both cut north. "
53 " I come from reckless, unsentimental people. "
54 " pretending as they waited that time had no value and what a lie. A lie they didn’t mind. They were on the clock, being paid to forsake time’s value by standing under the sun like they had all day. "
55 " On that day, nothing could have seemed more romantic to me, no other scenario more like real courtship, than a Chinese movie and a hand job under a coat. "
56 " Enchantment means to want something and also to know, somewhere inside yourself, not an obvious place, that you aren't going to get it. p.71 "
57 " Certain women were best viewed from the window of a speeding car, the exaggeration of their makeup and their tight clothes. Maybe women were meant to speed past, just a blur. Like China girls. Flash, and then gone. "
58 " Enchantment means to want something and also to know somewhere inside yourself, not an obvious place, that you aren't going to get it p.71 "
59 " The woman senses that time is more purely hers if she squanders it and keeps it empty, holds it, feels it pass by, and resists filling it with anything that might put some too-useful dent in its open, airy emptiness. "
60 " To show you the uselessness of the truth,” he said. "