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Fraud: Essays QUOTES

Fraud: Essays QUOTES

1 " The logic underlying the truism that one should always travel on a plane with a book is also precisely why bed-and-breakfast culture is to be avoided if at all possible. Namely, you might have to talk to someone. "

― David Rakoff , Fraud: Essays

2 " Almost any age is better than twenty-two. "

― David Rakoff , Fraud: Essays

3 " I come by my alarmism honestly. I have learned this custom over the years as I have settled into being a true New Yorker. This is how we welcome foreigners to our shores. Because we are so often frightened by living here, we are annoyed and offended when visitors fail to show the proper signs of terror. So we try to scare the living daylights out of them. "

― David Rakoff , Fraud: Essays

4 " if psychoanalysis was late-19th-century secular Judaism's way of constructing spiritual meaning in a post-religious world and retail is the late 20th century's way of constructing meaning in a postreligious world, what does it mean that I'm impersonating the father of psychoanalysis in a store window to commemorate a religious holiday? "

― David Rakoff , Fraud: Essays

5 " What remains of your past if you didn't allow yourself to feel it when it happened? If you don't have your experiences in the moment, if you gloss them over with jokes or zoom past them, you end up with curiously dispassionate memories. "

― David Rakoff , Fraud: Essays

6 " Not being funny doesn’t make you a bad person. Not having a sense of humor does. "

― David Rakoff , Fraud: Essays

7 " This brings up yet another, far more important misconception: that being comically generative and having a sense of humor are one and the same thing. The former is among the least important things in the world, while the latter is among the most. One is a handy social tool, the other an integral component of human survival. It bears repeating a third time: Not being funny doesn't make you a bad person. Not having a sense of humor does. "

― David Rakoff , Fraud: Essays

8 " Sheila taught me a survival technique for getting through seemingly intolerable situations-boring lunches, stern lectures on attitude or time management, those necessary breakup conversations, and the like: maintaining eye contact, keep your face inscrutable and masklike, with your faintest hint at a Gioconda smile. Keep this up as long as you possibly can, and just as you feel you are about to crack and take a letter opener and plunge it into someone's neck, fold your hands in your lap, one nestled inside the other, like those of a supplicant in a priory. Now, with the index finger of your inner hand, write on the palm of the other, very discreetly and undetectably, "I hate you. I hate you. I hate you..." over and over again as you pretend to listen. You will find that this brings a spontaneous look of interest and pleased engagement to your countenance. Continue and repeat as necessary. "

― David Rakoff , Fraud: Essays

9 " But even this gives rise to another central tenet, attendant to the Comedy Is Good myth: Comedy Is Hard. Certainly well-rendered comedy is hard. All things done well require practice and work. But for the most funny people, being funny is as inevitable as being double-jointed; it is a worldview formed long before words. One is born funny. The adage, as is, is incomplete. It should be Comedy is hard... if you're not funny. Pirouettes are almost impossible... without legs. Jokes can be honed, made better, tighter, and cleaner, and people can even be made funnier. But you can't really make someone funny who isn't. "

― David Rakoff , Fraud: Essays

10 " The central drama of my life is about being a fraud, alas. That's a complete lie, really; the central drama of my life is actually about being lonely, and staying thin, but fraudulence gets a fair amount of play. "

― David Rakoff , Fraud: Essays

11 " The overriding sense of Tokyo...is that it is a city devoted to the new, sped up in a subtle but profound way: a postmodern science-fiction story set ten minutes in the future. "

― David Rakoff , Fraud: Essays

12 " My exuberance isn't entirely food related. I have been so relieved to find that the city in and of itself is not enough to unlock the sadness or fear of my younger self. To the contrary, I have been unable to wipe the smile from my face since I arrived, giddy with a sense of survival. It's not even clear to me that that old misery is still even housed in my body anymore. I had been avoiding a monster behind a door for thirteen years, only to find that it had melted away long ago, nothing more than a spun-sugar bogeyman. It's definitely not the first time in my adulthood that I have realized this, but it never fails to cheer me to have it proven yet again that almost any age is better than twenty-two. "

― David Rakoff , Fraud: Essays

13 " Details can change or go missing entirely, particularly in moments of physical peril. A kind of amnesia goes hand in hand with sickness, and a good thing, too. "

― David Rakoff , Fraud: Essays

14 " What remains of your past if you didn't allow yourself to feel it when it happened? If you don't have your experiences in the moment, if you gloss over them with jokes or zoom past them, you end up with curiously dispassionate memories. Procedural and depopulated. It's as if a neutron bomb went off and all you're left with are hospital corridors, where you're scanning the walls for familiar photographs. "

― David Rakoff , Fraud: Essays

15 " The collective delusion here is overwhelming narcissism posing as altruism. "

― David Rakoff , Fraud: Essays

16 " The man beside me, apropos of nothing, raises his hand and says that there is 'a story' that man started society because he was 'cast out of a garden because of a sin.' He doesn't attribute this anecdote, leaving it a blind item from a source we might not know. He seems nice enough but potentially dangerous. "

― David Rakoff , Fraud: Essays

17 " When medicine is socialized, when you have true universal health care, when everyone's treatment is the same regardless of socioeconomic station, those strong-arming attitudes of entitlement just aren't part of the vocabulary. This atrium, this lovely space in a hospital with a world-class reputation, is actually the equivalent of a state hospital. That American sense that someone somewhere else is getting what you're not, and the attendant demands that go along with that perceived injustice, well, it's just not in the equation here. "

― David Rakoff , Fraud: Essays

18 " Rather than making you never want to eat chicken again, it simply makes you angry. It makes you hold a grudge. You'll eat chicken again, by God, and you'll chew really, really hard. "

― David Rakoff , Fraud: Essays

19 " There are even more galvanizing aspects to the Canadian psyche than mere reticence. There is the collective fear, at least when I was growing up, of becoming too big for our britches. To paraphrase Lorne Michaels (my countryman), it's the kind of place where they award Miss Canada to the runner-up, because the prettiest already gets to be the prettiest. Rather than demanding liberty or, failing that, death, we are a country forever giving up our seats to the elderly, all the while thanking one another for not smoking. "

― David Rakoff , Fraud: Essays

20 " To paraphrase Lorne Michaels (my countryman), it’s the kind of place where they award Miss Canada to the runner-up, because the prettiest already gets to be prettiest. "

― David Rakoff , Fraud: Essays