Home > Work > The Fuck-Up

The Fuck-Up QUOTES

The Fuck-Up QUOTES

1 " I had grazed along the surface of her actions and made deep judgments. Rejecting someone because you couldn't understand their love, that was a new one. The more I thought about it the longer the shadow of doubt stretched over all my conclusions. More often than not, things were as they seemed. But as I stared at her, she wasn't as bad looking as I had once thought. I realized how all this time I had seen her the wrong way, and how one's character affects one's appearance. Although she wasn't my type she was attractive. As I thought about her - the vulnerable intelligence, the violent honesty, and the fact that in the entire city she was the only one who took me in and fed me - she became more and more irresistible. Baited by an obscure beauty, trapped by an intense sorrow - all prior definitions had been overruled: this was love. "

― Arthur Nersesian , The Fuck-Up

2 " When I was in my teens, I made an appraisal of how comfortable my life could turn out when I became the age I am now. Because of a mechanical failure, the prediction was inexact. "

― Arthur Nersesian , The Fuck-Up

3 " Perhaps the price of comfort is that life passes more rapidly. But for anyone who has lived in uneasiness, even for a short, memorable duration, it's a trade-off that will gladly be made. "

― Arthur Nersesian , The Fuck-Up

4 " As the components of your life are stripped away, after all the ambitions and hopes vaporize, you reach a self-reflective starkness-- the repetitious plucking of a single overwound string. "

― Arthur Nersesian , The Fuck-Up

5 " Some of the more industrious ones were washing the windshields of cars that had been trapped by the red light. I used to see them from inside cars and think they brought it on themselves, and they probably did but now it didn't make a difference. I went over to the fire and warmed my hands with the group. I looked at their faces: idiots, criminals, retards, schizophrenics, paranoids, rejects, fuck-ups, broken-down failures. Alone, once children, never asked to be put on this earth, they ended up as jurors. Their lives were the verdict: the system, the man, something had failed. "

― Arthur Nersesian , The Fuck-Up

6 " Once, as a teenager, I had believed that people could change themselves. Finally I realized that all one could ever hope was understanding one's filthy self better. "

― Arthur Nersesian , The Fuck-Up

7 " In Brooklyn I am content, the closest we can come to a sustained happiness. "

― Arthur Nersesian , The Fuck-Up

8 " You knew what I wanted."
"And you knew what I wanted."
"Yeah, to make yourself feel pretty at someone's agony. Fuck you. "

― Arthur Nersesian , The Fuck-Up

9 " My last chance had vanished into itself like a snail coiling up into his shell.

Insidiously I had lost my grip, and now this was it. I thought all this without much emotion. I really didn't care anymore. I couldn't hang on anymore. I didn't have the guts to kill myself, but I didn't want it to continue. I walked a couple of blocks, empty, listless, and wished I could cry.

...The diabolic hope, the purposeful pulsing of blood, the flight into coherence allowed for some rationalizing an afterlife. A new theology was evolving, one that had a faith-in-death clause. It was evolved when I kicked a dead waterbug on the pavement. It was dried out, hollowed, emptied, like some kind of shell. Maybe, I thought, its body is a shell, maybe all bodies are shells. We hatch and die. Our spirit or something like that is the yoke: it lives the real life, the true life.

It wasn't comforting. "

― Arthur Nersesian , The Fuck-Up