Jack Foster > Quotes

“Melancholy is that a scrambled egg can't be unscrambled--entropy increases--experience is subject to the arrow of time. And the infinite sadness of my life consists in that I only recognize the beauty of simple arrangements from the relative vantage of the scrambled; memory, not experience, is my only access to it. Anxiety is the progression toward equilibrium. Despair is the inescapability. Insanity is the rationalizing of it all. Sanity is the irrational acceptance of it all. Indifference is just detached therapy. And progression--activity / toil / tasks / success / failure--just coping distraction and procrastination, just ill-placed deferment--my preferred route. And crisis--”
― Jack Foster, Fresh Fruit: A Preface

“He concluded: "This piece of fruit is not much like the fruit at all.”
― Jack Foster

“We rebelled, even if only temporarily. For a few hours every day, we dropped the rock, left the mount, and turned our backs to the toil and responsibility given and demanded of us by our gods and the authorities appointed to maintain them, and turned instead toward the reprieve we could only seem to find as we closed our eyes and slept together in those craters. We had committed the unforgivable sin of our age, against our age, and we found rest.”
― Jack Foster, Fresh Fruit: A Preface

“I blinked.
And then couldn't.
Let me be a little more explicit: "We have invented happiness," and I am lost. Hell is heaven forged by mankind and populated by mankind convinced of it . . . Hell is, because "I am".”
― Jack Foster, Fresh Fruit: A Preface

“I wanted her defiance.
I wanted my voice to crack.
I wanted change,
to change.
I didn't.
I didn't have the time off.
It was inconvenient.
I was too tired.
I had a big day ahead of me.”
― Jack Foster, Fresh Fruit: A Preface

“Despite my longing, how utterly unfit for paradise I am.”
― Jack Foster, Fresh Fruit: A Preface

“--searing pervading pessimistic black rings into the ruins of the sun-bleached eyes of a deconstructed ghost--a verging apostate of my age, of the promises of . . .”
― Jack Foster, Fresh Fruit: A Preface

“Though my social media posts will suggest otherwise, I must now confess that I prefer the tranquil, tropical image on my screensaver to the beach.”
― Jack Foster, Fresh Fruit: A Preface

“We laid in that artillery crater until dusk and prayed for a miracle: an asteroid, an airline employee strike, a follow-up artillery shell, a plague, nuclear holocaust, paralysis, anything to prevent us from getting up, from separation--first her head from my chest, then my hand from her hand, then her flight from my flight, and then my plans from us and her plans from us, and then her thoughts of us and my thoughts of us, and then her smell from my sheet and my smell from her shirt, and then . . . as the sun drifted into oblivion, forever erasing our now orange horizon, in a last desperate attempt, against a purple sky, she gave in to the absurd: "We could just remain." All I did was shrug.”
― Jack Foster, Fresh Fruit: A Preface

“A portico full of people who had traveled thousands of miles to meet up in paradise--now unanimously, fully engaged on their smartphones, sharing their experience.”
― jack foster, Fresh Fruit: A Preface

“I retain my libertarian freedom to ignore my smartphone.”
― Jack Foster, Fresh Fruit: A Preface

“She looked as though she could be of any ethnicity, or of all at once--if "beautiful" and its synonyms and cognates weren't so diluted with every other word or phrase that they had ever been paired with, I would now employ them all in earnest. But to use descriptors of Helen of Troy would be to so utterly understate the matter that the severity of misdescription would plunge the language into total semantic collapse.”
― Jack Foster, Fresh Fruit: A Preface

“We have "taken the reigns" from God and Nature--and I can't wait to see what we become!”
― Jack Foster, Fresh Fruit: A Preface

“I want to let the wind be.
I want to rebel against rebellion.
I want to be fit for paradise.
I want out.”
― Jack Foster, Fresh Fruit: A Preface

“All rebellion eventually culminates into standards, whether being crushed or victorious, whether established or novel--it's irrelevant.”
― Jack Foster, Fresh Fruit: A Preface

“--the hyper-desperate checking off of all the must dos of an expiring vacation, of ending time--the doomed quest of obtaining meaning in oversaturated trivialities, in tautologies and endless adjectival and adverbial hendiadys, in seeking serenity or substance in verbs. When "pause" is a hapax legomenon.”
― Jack Foster, Fresh Fruit: A Preface