Crazy long book, uneven, sometimes very funny, sometimes irritating. The lucid and honest portrait of addiction and recovery may explain why so many people describe this book as life-changing. Despite it's flaws, a must-read.
Quotes:
Page by page, line by line, it is probably the strangest, most distinctive, and most involved work of fiction by an American in the last twenty years.
When you exit these pages after that month of reading, you are a better person.
I’m not a machine. I feel and believe. I have opinions. Some of them are interesting.
Another way fathers impact sons is that sons, once their voices have changed in puberty, invariably answer the telephone with the same locutions and intonations as their fathers. This holds true regardless of whether the fathers are still alive.
Macdonald Chair in Prescriptive Usage
‘Personnes à Qui On Doit Surveiller Attentivement’ List.
an experialist and waste-exporting nation that’s forgotten privation and hardship
A U.S. of modern A. where the State is not a team or a code, but a sort of sloppy intersection of desires and fears, where the only public consensus a boy must surrender to is the acknowledged primacy of straight-line pursuing this flat and short-sighted idea of personal happiness:
Which is why tennis is an essentially tragic enterprise, to improve and grow as a serious junior, with ambitions. You seek to vanquish and transcend the limited self whose limits make the game possible in the first place. It is tragic and sad and chaotic and lovely.
It’s a herd of feral hamsters,
‘Stop her! She stole my heart!’
Marlon Brando was the archetypal new-type actor who ruined it looks like two whole generations’ relations with their own bodies and the everyday objects and bodies around them.
CHRONOLOGY OF ORGANIZATION OF NORTH AMERICAN NATIONS’ REVENUE-ENHANCING SUBSIDIZED TIME™, BY YEAR
As the one particular tough old guy or lady you’re always particularly scared of and drawn to says, nobody ever Comes In because things were going really well and they just wanted to round out their P.M. social calendar. Everybody, but everybody Comes In dead-eyed and puke-white and with their face hanging down around their knees and with a well-thumbed firearm-and-ordnance mail-order catalogue kept safe and available at home, map-wise, for when this last desperate resort of hugs and clichés turns out to be just happy horseshit, for you. You are not unique, they’ll say: this initial hopelessness unites every soul in this broad cold salad-bar’d hall. They are like Hindenburg-survivors. Every meeting is a reunion, once you’ve been in for a while.
a quotation from President Gentle’s second Inaugural: ‘Let the call go forth, to pretty much any nation we might feel like calling, that the past has been torched by a new and millennial generation of Americans,’
‘The truth will set you free. But not until it is finished with you.’
that horrible year Hal vaguely recalls when a nation became obsessed with the state of its tongue, when people would no sooner leave home without a tongue-scraper and an emergency backup tongue-scraper than they’d fail to wash and brush and spray.
everybody from Procter & Gamble to Tom’s of Maine had its own brand’s scraper out, some of them with baroque and potentially hazardous electronic extras.
Pat told Gately that grim honesty and hopelessness were the only things you need to start recovering from Substance-addiction, but that without these qualities you were totally up the creek. Desperation helped also, she said.
Pat had said it didn’t matter at this point what he thought or believed or even said. All that mattered was what he did. If he did the right things, and kept doing them for long enough, what Gately thought and believed would magically change.
Inman Square, too, is someplace Gately rarely goes anymore, because it’s in Cambridge’s Little Lisbon, heavily Portuguese, which means also Brazilians in the antiquated bellbottoms and flare-collared leisure suits they’ve never let go of, and where there are disco-ized Brazilians can cocaine and narcotics ever be far away.
YES, I’M PARANOID—BUT AM I PARANOID ENOUGH?
Haloperidol, McNeil Pharmaceutical, 5 mg./ml. pre-filled syringes: picture several cups of Celestial Seasonings’ Cinnamon Soother tea followed by a lead-filled sap across the back of the skull.
Saying this is bad is like saying traffic is bad, or health-care surtaxes, or the hazards of annular fusion: nobody but Ludditic granola-crunching freaks would call bad what no one can imagine being without.
The point here for the best kids is to inculcate their sense that it’s never about being seen. It’s never. If they can get that inculcated, the Show won’t fuck them up, Schtitt thinks. If they can forget everything but the game when all of you out there outside the fence see only them and want only them and the game’s incidental to you, for you it’s about entertainment and personality, it’s about the statue, but if they can get inculcated right they’ll never be slaves to the statue, they’ll never blow their brains out after winning an event when they win, or dive out a third-story window when they start to stop getting poked at or profiled, when their blossom starts to fade. Whether or not you mean to, babe, you chew them up, it’s what you do.’
They become celebrities instead of players, and because they are celebrities only as long as they feed the culture-of-goal’s hunger for the make-it, the winning, they are doomed, because you cannot both celebrate and suffer, and play is always suffering, just so.’
Terms the undepressed toss around and take for granted as full and fleshy—happiness, joie de vivre, preference, love—are stripped to their skeletons and reduced to abstract ideas. They have, as it were, denotation but not connotation.
U.S.A. recovery from the addictions was somewhat paramilitary in nature. There were orders and the obeying of orders.
‘IL NE FAUT PLUS QU’ON PURSUIVE LE BONHEUR’
‘I know of this meaning. I am spending a day to find someone I think my friends will kill, all the time I am awaiting the chance to betray my friends, and I come here and telephone to betray them and I see this bruised person who strongly resembles my wife. I think: Rémy, it is time for many drinks.’
Our club was called the Money-Stealers’ Club. At my suggestion we went with a descriptive name as opposed to euphemistic.
It seems like Don G.’s gotten way more popular as somebody to talk to since he’s become effectively paralyzed and mute.
tries to imagine what kind of impossible leap it would take to live that way all the time, by choice, straight: in the second, the Now, walled and contained between slow heartbeats.
Abiding. No one single instant of it was unendurable. Here was a second right here: he endured it. What was undealable-with was the thought of all the instants all lined up and stretching ahead, glittering.
I could hear faint sounds of early-morning weeping in certain rooms beyond my line of sight. Lots of the top players start the A.M. with a quick fit of crying, then are basically hale and well-wrapped for the rest of the day.
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