Peter Cameron > Quotes

“What if she was meant to be, or could have been, someone important in my life? I think that's what scares me: the randomness of everything. That the people who could be important to you might just pass you by. Or you pass them by. How do you know...I felt that by walking away I was abandoning [them], that I spent my entire life, day after day, abandoning people.”
― Peter Cameron, Someday This Pain Will Be Useful to You

“People who have only good experiences aren't very interesting. They may be content, and happy after a fashion, but they aren't very deep. It may seem a misfortune now, and it makes things difficult, but well--it's easy to feel all the happy, simple stuff. Not that happiness is necessarily simple. But I don't think you're going to have a life like that, and I think you'll be the better for it. The difficult thing is to not be overwhelmed by the bad patches. You must not let them defeat you. You must see them as a gift--a cruel gift, but a gift nonetheless.”
― Peter Cameron, Someday This Pain Will Be Useful to You

“I felt this awful obligation to be charming or at least have something to say, and the pressure of having to be charming (or merely verbal) incapacitates me.”
― Peter Cameron, Someday This Pain Will Be Useful to You

“I wish the whole day were like breakfast, when people are still connected to their dreams, focused inward, and not yet ready to engage with the world around them. I realized this is how I am all day; for me, unlike other people, there doesn't come a moment after a cup of coffee or a shower or whatever when I suddenly feel alive and awake and connected to the world. If it were always breakfast, I would be fine.”
― Peter Cameron, Someday This Pain Will Be Useful to You

“I hate when people say 'I see'. It doesn't mean anything and I think it's hostile. Whenever anyone tells me 'I see' I think they're really saying 'Fuck you'.”
― Peter Cameron, Someday This Pain Will Be Useful to You

“I often feel like I want to think something but I can't find the language that coincides with the thoughts, so it remains felt, not thought. Sometimes I feel like I'm thinking in Swedish without knowing Swedish.”
― Peter Cameron, Someday This Pain Will Be Useful to You

“I only feel like myself when I am alone.”
― Peter Cameron, Someday This Pain Will Be Useful to You

“New York is strange in the summer. Life goes on as usual but it’s not, it’s like everyone is just pretending, as if everyone has been cast as the star in a movie about their life, so they’re one step removed from it. And then in September it all gets normal again.”
― Peter Cameron, Someday This Pain Will Be Useful to You

“I always looked forward to being an adult, because I thought the adult world was, well—adult. That adults weren’t cliquey or nasty, that the whole notion of being cool, or in, or popular would case to be the arbiter of all things social, but I was beginning to realize that the adult world was as nonsensically brutal and socially perilous as the kingdom of childhood.”
― Peter Cameron, Someday This Pain Will Be Useful to You

“I found the idea of being a librarian very appealing--working in a place where people had to whisper and only speak when necessary. If only the world were like that!”
― Peter Cameron, Someday This Pain Will Be Useful to You

“I knew my mother was right, but that didn't change the way I felt about things. People always think that if they can prove they're right, you'll change your mind.”
― Peter Cameron, Someday This Pain Will Be Useful to You

“Most people think things are not real unless they are spoken, that it's the uttering of something, not the thinking of it, that legitimizes it. I suppose this is why people always want other people to say "I love you." I think just the opposite - that thoughts are realest when thought, that expressing them distorts or dilutes them, that it is best for them to stay in the dark climate-controlled airport chapel of your mind, that if they're released into the air and light they will be affected in a way that alters them, like film accidentally exposed.”
― Peter Cameron, Someday This Pain Will Be Useful to You

“Interacting with other people does not come naturally to me; it is a strain and requires effort, and since it does not come naturally I feel like I am not really myself when I make that effort. I feel fairly comfortable with my family, but even with them I sometimes feel the strain of not being alone.”
― Peter Cameron, Someday This Pain Will Be Useful to You

“One man’s nonsense is another man’s sense.”
― Peter Cameron, Someday This Pain Will Be Useful to You

“Sometimes I envy religious people for the comfort of believing. It would make everything so much easier.”
― Peter Cameron, Someday This Pain Will Be Useful to You

“Are you okay?' she asked me.
Of course,' I said. 'Why wouldn't I be okay?'
There are lots of reasons why you might not be okay.'
There are lots of reasons why anyone might not be okay,' I said.”
― Peter Cameron, Someday This Pain Will Be Useful to You

“I’m not a sociopath or a freak (although I don’t suppose people who are sociopaths or freaks self-identify as such); I just don’t enjoy being with people. People, at least in my experience, rarely say anything interesting to each other. They always talk about their lives and they don’t have very interesting lives. So I get impatient. For some reason I think you should only say something if it’s interesting or absolutely has to be said.”
― Peter Cameron, Someday This Pain Will Be Useful to You

“Most people think things are not real unless they are spoken, that it's the uttering of something, not the thinking of it, that legitimizes it. I suppose this is why people always want other people to say "I love you." I think just the opposite—that thoughts are realest when thought, that expressing them distorts or dilutes them.”
― Peter Cameron

“I don't know why I felt so closed and bitter and threatened by the things I did not like.”
― Peter Cameron, Someday This Pain Will Be Useful to You

“A young man and woman walked past - a handsome young man and pretty young woman, the man in a seersucker suit and the woman in an old-fashioned summer dress - and they were walking a bit apart from one another with a space between them, and the man was looking straight ahead and the woman had her arms crossed against her chest, hugging herself, looking down at her feet, at her toes that peeked out the open fronts of her shoes, and they both had the same gleefully suppressed smile on their faces, and I knew that they were freshly in love, perhaps they had fallen in love having dinner in some restaurant with a garden or tables on the sidewalk, perhaps they had not even kissed yet, and they walked apart because they thought they had their whole lives to walk close together, touching, and wanted to anticipate the moment they touched for as long as possible, and they passed my without noticing me and Miro. Something about watching them made me sad. I think it was too lovely: the summer night, the open-toed shoes, their faces rapt with momentarily ramped-down joy. I felt I had witnessed their happiest moment, the pinnacle, and they were already walking away from it, but they did not know it.”
― Peter Cameron, Someday This Pain Will Be Useful to You

“It seemed that everyone else could mate, could fit their parts together in pleasant and productive ways, but that some almost indistinguishable difference in my anatomy and psyche set me slightly, yet irrevocably, apart.”
― Peter Cameron, Someday This Pain Will Be Useful to You

“It wouldn't kill you to get me an iced coffee."
"No, but not getting killed doing something is not a very compelling reason to do it.”
― Peter Cameron, Someday This Pain Will Be Useful to You

“Just ignore him and he’ll go away, my mother used to say to Gillian when we were young and I bugged her. Just ignore him. All he wants is attention. In retrospect there seems to be something almost cruel about that—to simultaneously acknowledge and refuse someone’s desire for attention—especially a child’s. All he wants is attention, as if it’s bad to want attention, like wanting money or power or fame.”
― Peter Cameron, Someday This Pain Will Be Useful to You

“Dr. Adler had instructed me to always say whatever I was thinking, but this was difficult for me, for the act of thinking and the act of articulating those thoughts were not synchronous to me, or even necessarily consecutive. I knew that I thought and spoke in the same language and that theoretically there should be no reason why I could not express my thoughts as they occurred or soon thereafter, but the language in which I thought and the language in which I spoke, though both English, often seemed divided by a gap that could not be simultaneously, or even retrospectively, bridged.”
― Peter Cameron, Someday This Pain Will Be Useful to You

“I thought the best thing to do would be nothing, and in that way things couldn’t get any worse.”
― Peter Cameron, Someday This Pain Will Be Useful to You

“I don't think I could ever work in such a blatantly hierarchical corporate setting. I know that everyone in this world is not equal, but I can't bear environments that make this truth so obvious.”
― Peter Cameron, Someday This Pain Will Be Useful to You

“She had all the best things wrong with her—incest, insanity, drug addiction, bulimia, alopecia: you name it. All the perfect stuff for a memoir. She’s so lucky.”
― Peter Cameron, Someday This Pain Will Be Useful to You

“I think therapy is a rather misguided notion of capitalist societies whereby the self-indulgent examination of one's life supersedes the actual living of said life.”
― Peter Cameron, Someday This Pain Will Be Useful to You

“And the boys were all clean, their faces freshly and brutally shaved, their hair painstakingly gelled into exquisite apparent carelessness, with this electric feeling inside of them, which matched the feelings in the girls, that they were all ascending, moving into a future that could only improve them, and I wondered what it was like - the miracle, the stupidity of feeling that.”
― Peter Cameron, Someday This Pain Will Be Useful to You

“It was strange to see someone you have only known alone begin interacting with other people, for that somebody known to you disappears and is replaced by a different, more complex, person. You watch him revolve in this new company, revealing new facets, and there is nothing you can do but hope you like these other sides as much as you like the side that seemed whole when it faced only you.”
― Peter Cameron, The Weekend