Jeremy Robert Johnson > Quotes

“Icarus flew too close to the sun, but at least he flew.”
― Jeremy Robert Johnson, Skullcrack City

“Exactly how long can you stand on a street corner showing two drug dealers your scar-tissue-induced radical penis curvature? The answer is twelve seconds. After that it feels weird.”
― Jeremy Robert Johnson, Skullcrack City

“I considered sex work, but then I bent over and looked at my asshole in a mirror. Nobody was going to pay me for access to that thing.”
― Jeremy Robert Johnson, Skullcrack City

“They’d insert a probe into the patient’s head to press the nodule and the patient’s immediate response would be to shout out, “FUCK IT! WHY NOT?”
― Jeremy Robert Johnson, Skullcrack City

“Well, Hindsight, have you ever heard of the term Busy Idiot?”
― Jeremy Robert Johnson, Skullcrack City

“Quiet customers get served first.”
― Jeremy Robert Johnson, Skullcrack City

“By the time I twenty, I was just like everyone else. I still am”
― Jeremy Robert Johnson, Angel Dust Apocalypse

“I wasn’t a hoarder, but I knew my place gave off a Feral Child Hidey Hole vibe.”
― Jeremy Robert Johnson, Skullcrack City

“Once I catch a serious FUCK IT wave, I ride that thing right up to the sand.”
― Jeremy Robert Johnson, Skullcrack City

“The money buys the drugs, the drugs work harder and harder to trick your blackened dopamine receptors into giving a damn about living. At some point you make a choice: fight your need the rest of your goddamned long-suffering life, or fill your need until it disappears into the grave with you.”
― Jeremy Robert Johnson, Skullcrack City

“All of this took about a minute, but time stretches out when you’re witnessing an abomination.”
― Jeremy Robert Johnson, Skullcrack City

“The terrible loop began on a Tuesday and didn’t end until the day I saw a skullcracker swallow the brain of a bank-hired assassin.”
― Jeremy Robert Johnson, Skullcrack City

“I used to believe there was a part of the human brain we couldn’t quite excise, and its sole purpose was to encourage self-destruction. Someday, I thought, the guys working on the BRAIN Initiative would push aside a contour in the gray matter and find a pulsing, jet-black spot. They’d insert a probe into the patient’s head to press the nodule and the patient’s immediate response would be to shout out, “FUCK IT! WHY NOT?”
― Jeremy Robert Johnson, Skullcrack City

“The standard freak show chic bullshit which had beset the generation after mine thanks to a string of wildly successful reality shows centering on competitive body modification. I’d had fun watching Manual Mutants and Oddfellas when they first started, but then The League of Zeroes came along and made things too grotesque. They lost me when Rectal Rachelle died on the table during her ass-neck implant surgery.”
― Jeremy Robert Johnson, Skullcrack City

“There would be hell to pay (or purgatory to rent, at a minimum) if I did not act fast.”
― Jeremy Robert Johnson, We Live Inside You

“Well, you put a gun to my head.”
“No. I put a suggestion in your mind and a gun in your hands.”
― Jeremy Robert Johnson, Skullcrack City

“Loneliness is a hell of a drug.”
― Jeremy Robert Johnson, Skullcrack City

“No one chooses to become a banker. It just happens, like cancer, and then you try to live with it for as long as you can. After thirteen years in the industry, I was damn near terminal. With each step up the corporate ladder I received a slightly smaller laptop, a slightly-harder-to-adjust office chair. To compensate they offered free donuts and coffee cards. Weekends off. 401K vesting. Medical insurance that I had to have because they were turning me into a half-blind hunchback with diabetes. The”
― Jeremy Robert Johnson, Skullcrack City

“Any law which runs counter to the good of man is no law at all.”
― Jeremy Robert Johnson, Skullcrack City

“I mean, I had my turtle Deckard, but his lifestyle consisted of sunbathing, eating goldfish, and—somehow I just knew this—silently judging me while I masturbated. I’d taken to covering his tank with a thin blanket, but still…he knew.”
― Jeremy Robert Johnson, Skullcrack City

“You guys were the ones who thought it would be okay to pop a fucking octopus computer into somebody’s neck.”
― Jeremy Robert Johnson, The Loop

“Don’t worry. These cowboys are all in line. Nice, law-abiding batch here, only want to help you reach your dreams. They’re nothing like that last group who rolled through town with branding irons and rape-trusses and shotguns. These are the good guys.”
― Jeremy Robert Johnson, Skullcrack City

“One man against a corrupt system and I knew I could win! And Hindsight would like to point out I wasn’t even on the really hard drugs yet. I’d”
― Jeremy Robert Johnson, Skullcrack City

“The bodies of a man and his dog fused together, skin and fur melded. Nobody wanted to die alone.”
― Jeremy Robert Johnson, Extinction Journals

“No one chooses to become a banker. It just happens, like cancer, and then you try to live with it for as long as you can.”
― Jeremy Robert Johnson, Skullcrack City

“You must understand the immense power of self-serving delusion.” I”
― Jeremy Robert Johnson, Skullcrack City

“Ten glorious years at Pingfang, a sea of bodies brought to you by train. War as immunity from man’s laws. Before, you’d worked in the shadows. During the ten years you worked for Division 4 there were no such hindrances. Dr. Masaki ran the inventory, cataloguing prisoners as non-descript units referred to only as “Materials Used.” You preferred to call the prisoners “logs,” each destined for the incinerator after they’d been of use.”
― Jeremy Robert Johnson, Skullcrack City

“The night was vibrating with new potential, the beautiful after-haze of adrenaline and bad ideas fully embraced. Ugly thoughts crept in, forcing me to write off a growing list of concerning data: My old dealer gone mad and roaming the sewers; Egbert’s hand—notably short on its middle and ring fingers—reaching out to me with three tiny pill baggies; gas-masked kids dodging conscious thought like a plague; a trafficked tranny more concerned with evading cops than finding love.”
― Jeremy Robert Johnson, Skullcrack City

“Somewhere, floating in a muddled abstraction beyond your existence as a generally good person, are the Externalities. Fuck ’em and God Bless ’em.”
― Jeremy Robert Johnson, Skullcrack City

“Is that where we’re at? Finding joy in the prospect of slightly diminished atrocities?”
― Jeremy Robert Johnson, The Loop