Alex Shakar > Quotes

“She avoids deep thought like an empty restaurant, not out of stupidity, but a canny resolve to be happy.”
― Alex Shakar, Luminarium

“Childhood and adulthood were not factors of age but states of mind.”
― Alex Shakar, The Savage Girl

“With the Internet, we can choose the very communities we want to be a part of.”
― Alex Shakar, The Savage Girl

“Cats are there to be indulged. That's their function: to receive the love we never fully gave our parents. Not like dogs. Dogs are there to give us the love and devotion our children will never fully give us.”
― Alex Shakar, The Savage Girl

“That's the problem with relationships," George was saying. "It's a contract. You agree to be some unchanging caricature of yourself. To act the same way all the time. Never to change. It's counter-evolutionary. How can anything new and good come into your life, if you're holding on to something that doesn't exist anymore?”
― Alex Shakar, Luminarium

“You need contradictions to make an ideal.”
― Alex Shakar, The Savage Girl

“An ironic religion -- one that never claims to be absolutely true but only professes to be relatively beautiful, and never promises salvation but only proposes it as a salubrious idea. A century ago there were people who thought art was the thing that could fuse the terms of this seemingly insuperable oxymoron, and no doubt art is part of the formula. But maybe consumerism also has something to teach us about forging an ironic religion -- a lesson about learning to choose, about learning the power and consequences, for good or ill, of our ever-expanding palette of choices. Perhaps . . . the day will come when the true ironic religion is found, the day when humanity is filled with enough love and imagination and responsibility to become its own god and make a paradise of its world, a paradise of all the right choices.”
― Alex Shakar, The Savage Girl

“Children, awkward, isolate, their bodies crammed to bursting with caffein and sugar and pop music and cologne and perfume and hairgel and pimple cream and growth hormone-treated hamburger meat and premature sex drives and costly, fleeting, violent sublimations. It's all part of the conspiracy . . . all of it trying to convince them that they're here to be trained for lives of adventure and glamor and heroism, when in fact they're here only to be trained for more of the same, for lives of plunking in the quarters, paying a premium for the never-ending series of shabby fantasies to come, the whole lifelong laser light show of glamorous degradation and habitual novelty and fun-loving murder and global isolation.”
― Alex Shakar, The Savage Girl

“Beauty is the PR campaign of the soul.”
― Alex Shakar, The Savage Girl

“The only spot of comfort was the lingering impression of her fingertips through the fabric of his shirt, a reminder of the good side of having skin. He cultivated that square-inch patch, tilled and tended it into a full-body embrace.”
― Alex Shakar, Luminarium

“He dozed off, into a dreamless oblivion, for what seemed like seconds but was in fact hours, and awoke hungover, the inner surface of his skull pulsing like a single, giant nerve being chewed by some ruminant animal.”
― Alex Shakar, Luminarium

“How easy it is for men to talk about beauty, and how subtly intimidating when they do.”
― Alex Shakar, The Savage Girl

“Fred put away the phone, finished off his bourbon, and resumed watching the couple suck on the combined mass of their two tongues. He wasn't as drunk as them. Or as young. Or as stupid. He envied them on every score.”
― Alex Shakar, Luminarium

“It's kind of a dark little life . . . being a paranoiac, but it's also not without its comforts.”
― Alex Shakar, The Savage Girl

“On a cement pediment stands the inevitable bronze statue of a man in a cheap suit.”
― Alex Shakar, The Savage Girl

“From the beauty they deserve will come the love they deserve. And from the love will follow truth.”
― Alex Shakar, The Savage Girl

“Our world exists only to hold up this other world, this ideal world. It's the world of our dreams, our desires. It's elaborate, it's heavy, and we carry it around with us everywhere. But we don't mind. The more that's up here, the better. Because up here is where we keep all that's best in us. The more that's up here, the richer our imagination becomes. . . . Products are the materials we use to build our world above the world.”
― Alex Shakar, The Savage Girl

“That a few fanatics had flown airplanes down into all of that seemed less surprising to him than that legions more hadn't yet done the same. Half the world or more was already setting itself against all the complexity in one way or another, going to off to live in caves or gated communities, dreaming of a world with one god, one book, a world small enough to feel that one wasn't lost in it.”
― Alex Shakar, Luminarium

“She recalls the smell of bologna, the slimy, metallic taste of it on her tongue. Not for the first time she decides to become a vegetarian.”
― Alex Shakar, The Savage Girl

“Contradictions stop only the people who stop and think about them, who stop to question the consistency of their various desires instead of simply forging ahead and fulfilling them all.”
― Alex Shakar, The Savage Girl

“What's the paradessence of ice cream?”
― Alex Shakar, The Savage Girl

“What good was a truth that could be perceived only through delusion?”
― Alex Shakar, Luminarium