The Rapture QUOTES

1 " Lord, What a terrible shame. You're so attractive!'
I know, I want to tell her. It should have happened to someone really ugly. And then it wouldn't have mattered. "

― Liz Jensen , The Rapture

2 " Hangovers are a vivid form of vengeance. Last night my apartment became the venue for a small, introverted chardonnay festival. A melancholy choir of Bulgarians provided the entertainment, via a set of headphones that ended up irredeemably tangled beneath the bed. Part of me just watched. The other part was in charge. "

― Liz Jensen , The Rapture

3 " The shimmering tarmac of the deserted basketball court, a line of industrial-sized garbage cans, and beyond the electrified perimeter fence a vista that twangs a country and western chord of self-pity in me. For a brief moment, when I first arrived, I thought of putting a photo of Alex - Laughing Alpha Male at Roulette Wheel - next to my computer, alongside my family collection: Late Mother Squinting Into Sun on Pebbled Beach, Brother Pierre with Postpartum Wife and Male Twins, and Compos Mentis Father Fighting Daily Telegraph Crossword. But I stopped myself. Why give myself a daily reminder of what I have in every other way laid to rest? Besides, there would be curiosity from colleagues, and my responses to their questions would seem either morbid or tasteless or brutal depending on the pitch and role of my mood. Memories of my past existence, and the future that came with it, can start as benign, Vaselined nostalgia vignettes. But they’ll quickly ghost train into Malevolent noir shorts backlit by that great worst enemy of all victims of circumstance, hindsight. So for the sake of my own sanity, I apologize silently to Alex before burying him in the desk alongside my emergency bottle of Lauphroaig and a little homemade flower press given to me by a former patient who hanged himself with a clothesline.
The happy drawer. "

― Liz Jensen , The Rapture

4 " There’s this expectation that we should all be sexual beings, but the fact is, not all of us are, particularly. "

― Liz Jensen , The Rapture

5 " But weirdness is relative in the territory occupied by the mentally deranged. "

― Liz Jensen , The Rapture

6 " Forget about the other girls’ ambitions, Bethany, whatever you think they are. What do you want? “
She stops, and together we look at the wall of red creeper. “If I had a baby I call it Felix. That means happy, right? It would be kind of an ironic name.” I wait for more, thinking: The name I always had in mind was Max. “But I won’t be having a baby.” Me neither. They said I nearly died, there was “no way of saving anything.” Anything: an interesting euphemism. No Max. Not now, not ever.
“But how can you know you’ll never have children? “
“What’s the point, when the world’s fucked? I’d have to be a sadist.” Haresh Modak and the Planetarians would agree with her. They’re singing from the same hymn sheet. "

― Liz Jensen , The Rapture

7 " There is “colossal arrogance“, he maintains, in the assumption that humans will last forever. If one looks at the planet’s life across billions of years, rather than in terms of humankind’s meager history as a dominant species, we will see that our presence on earth has lasted the blink of an eye. “We are the agents of our own destruction - and when we are gone, extinguished by our own heedless quest for expansion, the planet will not mourn us. Indeed, it will have cause to rejoice. Today, the human species stands at the brink of a new mass extinction which will see, if not it’s disappearance, then its extreme marginalization./ for the first time in human history, the destruction - already apparent – is global. In times past, children and grandchildren were seen as a blessing, a sign of faith in the future of the gene pool. Now, it would seem that the kindest thing to do for our grandchildren is to refrain from generating them. “
Although more conservative and measured than the planetarian on the TV, Modak’s underlying message seems to be that pessimism is the new realism. I do not doubt his projections or his figures or his graphs. But his conclusions depress me. "

― Liz Jensen , The Rapture

8 " You and Meera didn’t have children. I imagine that was a private response.”
“Why create hostages to a future whose shape one could so clearly see? The decision was to avoid grief. For oneself but also for others. “ from habit, I note detailing use of “one “instead of “I “or “we “and store the observation. “The world is too full. But the childless are always punished. It’s a great irony that one gets called selfish for making what is essentially the altruistic choice. "

― Liz Jensen , The Rapture

9 " There are many things I would like to believe in, because they would accord life coherence. One of them is God. Another is the notion that on the brink of death one’s life dances before one’s eyes in kaleidoscopic fragments: dramas, traumas, transcendent highs, troughs of gloom, or the crystallize moments that encapsulate a certain mood on a certain day, like - for me - the smell of forsythia blossom at nursery school, or a turn of phrase - “ca va tourner au vinaigre “ - used by my mother, bitterly, to someone on the phone, or the pop of the dog fleas Pierre and I picked from our terrier and flicked onto the barbecue, or the appalling intimacy of my first kiss, or the body blow of my mother’s death, or the chaos of Pierre’s wedding, or the aching realization that dawned when my father said “Mesopotamia” instead of “kitchen”, or the night I shouted at Alex and he swerved, or the morning the doctors gave me the final assessment of my paraplegia and, for want of anything better to do, I glanced at the clock and noted that it was 11:23. "

― Liz Jensen , The Rapture

10 " Watching TV puts your own hell into a different perspective, if that’s what you want. Today I do. "

― Liz Jensen , The Rapture

11 " It’s a ground floor apartment in the old part of Hadport. I don’t see much of Mrs. Zarnac, who lives upstairs. Lonely-looking older men visit her, And when she cooks for them vinegar smells waft down. Crosses my mind he might be pickling them alive, one after another, for some dark embalming project. "

― Liz Jensen , The Rapture

12 " I’m remembering there’s a word in Russian, izgoy, that describes someone with a flaw that makes that person singularly unfit to perform his or her professional role. A blocked writer, I lascivious priest, a drunken chauffeur. As a screwed-up therapist,someone like me should not be working at all. Not yet. It is far too soon. And you can tell that. Bethany, with her Competence Scale, already has. But here I am. An izgoy. "

― Liz Jensen , The Rapture

13 " There’s a man with her. He’s blonde, balding, harassed-looking, and probably what they call time-poor. Older. He looks at me over the steering wheel and gives a helpless, frustrated gesture, as though I should be able to identify and sympathize with his plight. Then, as the woman starts to open the car door, he stops her with a swift movement. And suddenly they’re struggling, locked into a graceless, desperate tussle. I picture the dull, bestial unhappiness of a couple shackled to each other by their mortgage and their children’s shareed DNA. "

― Liz Jensen , The Rapture

14 " Meanwhile in Iran and Israel the violence is an open wound on TV, so predictable and it’s bloodiness of the mutilated children and howling women become a spectacle you shatter it briefly before zapping over to some Japanese game show. The well-meaning optimism of those Entertainement programs, with their perky nerdiness and banana-skin tomfoolery, provides a counterpoint to the real world grief. Their crude hilarities flit through my head while I swim my laps, like my Spanish Kahlo mantra or fragments of some absurd erotic fantasy, poignantly irrelevant. "

― Liz Jensen , The Rapture