Sam Lipsyte > Quotes

“We are going to eat ice cream and we are going to eat shit. The trick is to use different spoons.”
― Sam Lipsyte, The Ask

“One of my big revelations was that nobody cares whether you write your novel or not. They want you to be happy. Your parents want you to have health insurance. Your friends want you to be a good friend. But everyone’s thinking about their own problems and nobody wakes up in the morning thinking, ‘Boy, I sure hope Sam finishes that chapter and gets one step closer to his dream of being a working writer.’ Nobody does that. If you want to write, it has to come from you. If you don’t want to write, that’s great. Go do something else. That was a very liberating moment for me.”
― Sam Lipsyte

“Shudder, in fact, is not quite the word for the feeling. Feeling is not quite the word for the feeling. How's bathing at knifepoint in the phlegm of the dead? Is that a feeling?”
― Sam Lipsyte

“I bought an energy bar, and as I ate it a great weariness came over me.”
― Sam Lipsyte

“I'm a citizen of the republic of empathy.”
― Sam Lipsyte

“Everything's weird if you stare at it.”
― Sam Lipsyte

“Judging by your face, the what-the-fuck nodes in your cerebral cortex must be a real light show.”
― Sam Lipsyte, The Ask

“I knew I was in the vicinity of a serious lesson, if not about how to live life, then at least how to put some poetry into your craven retreat from it.”
― Sam Lipsyte, Home Land

“I'd become one of those mistakes you sometimes find in an office, a not unpleasant but mostly unproductive presence bobbing along on the energy tides of others, a walking reminder of somebody's error in judgement.”
― Sam Lipsyte, The Ask

“Tomorrow she’d look up tattoo removal. They were doing big things with lasers now. When Cal was just a little more stable, she’d break up with him, gently, and then she’d begin her project of helping everybody she could help, and after that she’d head out on a great long journey to absolutely nowhere and write a gorgeous poem cycle steeped in heavenly lavender-scented closure and also utter despair, a poem cycle you could also actually ride for its aerobic benefits, and she’d pedal that fucker straight across the face of the earth until at some point she’d coast right off the edge, whereupon she’d giggle and say, “Oh, shit.”
― Sam Lipsyte

“I was also one of those people who hadn’t caught up with the latest social networking site. Maura belonged to most of them. She passed most evenings befriending men who had tried to date-rape her in high school, but I was still stuck in the last virtual community, a sad place to be, like Europe, say, during the Black Death. Whenever I cruised this site, with its favorites lists and its paeans to somebody’s cousin’s gas station art gallery, I could not help but think of medieval corpses in the spring-thaw mud, buboes sprouted in every armpit and anus, black bile curling out of frozen mouths. Those of us still cursed with life wandered the blasted dales of this stricken network, wept and moaned and flogged ourselves with frayed AC adaptors, called out for God to strike us dead, or else let us find somebody who liked similar bands.”
― Sam Lipsyte, The Ask

“You can't go walking through Mordor in naught but your skin. ”
― Sam Lipsyte

“I was glad I'd remembered to shucksify my vocabulary in the company of children.”
― Sam Lipsyte, The Ask

“This country was built on the backs of dudes who drank on buses. What we do honors them.”
― Sam Lipsyte, The Ask

“The place resembled a new model prison, or one that had achieved a provisional utopia after principled revolt, or maybe a homeless shelter for people with liberal arts degrees. The cages brought to mind those labs with their death-fuming vents near my college studio. These kids were part of some great experiment. It was maybe the same one in which I'd once been a subject. Unlike me, though, or the guinea pigs and hares, they were happy, or seemed happy, or were blogging about how they seemed happy.”
― Sam Lipsyte, The Ask

“Who exactly are we?' I asked.
The American Dreamers. There aren't too many of us left.'
I don't know if I qualify.'
You an American? Or want to be an American?'
I am an American.'
You said you were having a dream.'
It's true, I did.'
Was it the one where you're inside the girl and you are pumping her and pumping her and you are so happy but then it turns out it's not a girl, it's really one of those super poisonous box jellyfish, and it stings you and you are screaming and screaming and the sky rains the diarrhea of babies?'
The...no, I don't think so.'
I get that sometimes. Anyway, see you around.”
― Sam Lipsyte, The Ask

“They weren’t like dolls, because dolls had no feelings. Kids had feelings, just not any remotely related to yours.”
― Sam Lipsyte, The Ask

“You’re growing up. All you need to remember is that nothing changes. New technology, new markets, global interconnectivity, doesn’t matter. It’s still the rulers and the ruled. The fleecers and the fleeced.” “Which are you?” “I’m a piece of expensive equipment. You, too. Maybe not so expensive. [...]”
― Sam Lipsyte, The Ask

“I felt as though I were snorting cocaine, or rappelling down a cliffside, or cliffsurfing off a cliff of pure cocaine.”
― Sam Lipsyte, The Ask

“You pay a whore to make you feel like a man, you fund a philharmonic to make yourself feel like a refined man.”
― Sam Lipsyte, The Ask

“You think you know yourself, the world. You believe you've got a bead on everybody else's bullshit, but what about your own?”
― Sam Lipsyte, The Fun Parts

“She liked reality shows the best, and then the shows that purported to be about reality.”
― Sam Lipsyte, The Ask

“Yes, we could solve for why, but we could also eat another slice of coconut cake.”
― Sam Lipsyte, The Fun Parts

“It was early, late, lockjaw hour.”
― Sam Lipsyte, Venus Drive

“Yes,” said Cooley. “That is the question, as the Bard might say.” “The Bard?” “What’s so funny?” said Cooley. “Nothing, sir,” I said. “I just didn’t know people still used that term.” “Well, I’m a people, Burke. Am I not?” “Of course.” “If you prick me, do I not bleed, you scat-gobbling, mother-rimming prick?” Occasionally Dean Cooley reverted to a vocabulary more suited to his marine years, but some maintained it was only when he felt threatened, or stretched for time. “Yes, sir,” I said.”
― Sam Lipsyte, The Ask

“His eyes had the ebb of his liver in them and he bore the air of a man who looks right at you and only sees the last of himself.”
― Sam Lipsyte, Venus Drive

“I needed to talk to Vargina, to straighten this out, but felt suddenly faint, headed for the deli across the street. Just standing in the vicinity of comfort food was comfort. The schizophrenic glee with which you cold load your plastic shell with spinach salad, pork fried rice, turkey with cranberry, chicken with pesto, curried yams, clams casino, breadsticks, and yogurt, pay for it by the pound, this farm feed for human animals in black chinos and pleated chinos, animals whose enclosure included the entire island of Manhattan, this sensation I treasured deeply.”
― Sam Lipsyte, The Ask

“Oh, do you, Milo? You’re so selfish. You don’t see the bigger picture.” “What’s the bigger picture?” “You’re still here looking for handouts. Who’s going to take care of me?” “I’m on my knees here, Mom. Not for me, for my family. For my wife. For a beautiful grandson you have totally ignored.” “He’s kind of a brat. I’ll be in his life when he gets a little impulse control.” “He’s not even four.” “I have needs. I’m tired of this child-worshipping culture. You’re just a slave to it, Milo.” “I’m only trying to be a decent dad.” “Don’t waste your time. It’s not in your genes. Besides, try making some money. That might be a good dad move. For heaven’s sake, the system’s rigged for white men and you still can’t tap in.” “You’re right, Mom. What can I say? But still, it would mean a lot to me if you made a little more of an effort with Bernie.” “Bernie schmernie. This is my decade.” “Okay, you wrinkled old spidercunt, have it your way.”
― Sam Lipsyte, The Ask

“We’d been walking in endless rectangles and now we were near the candy store again. The lights were out, the security gate down. We leaned up against the wall of a bank and I could feel the cool stone on my back, the billions of dollars thrumming through wires beneath and behind me, or on the night waves above. I wasn’t quite sure how they traveled. Or how much they got out anymore.”
― Sam Lipsyte, The Ask

“Why do you think posers pose? Because they want to be invited to the dominion of the real. And they know their very desire for it disqualifies them.”
― Sam Lipsyte, The Fun Parts