Max Booth III > Quotes

“Sometimes I can’t decide what would be worse: if we died from starvation or if we never died.”
― Max Booth III, We Need to Do Something

“She could see how the entirety of human inquiry was irrelevant. Human creativity nothing more than a petulant whine after listening to the songs of burnt out stars, the poetry of entropy. Voices of dead throats in ancient caverns.”
― Max Booth III, Lost Signals

“What the fuck is a subreddit?”
― Max Booth III, We Need to Do Something

“We have to do something, don’t we?” I wail. “We have to do something.”
― Max Booth III, We Need to Do Something

“The guests just stand there, staring at us like we’re all a part of some bad dream. And we are. But the thing is, none of us are ever going to wake up again. But the thing is, that’s perfectly okay.”
― Max Booth III, The Nightly Disease

“There’d been a skylight too, usually kept shuttered . . . but here she suddenly found herself gripped by yet another memory-rush, so keen it was like she was right there again for just a fraction of a second, caught fast in the moment like a webbed-up fly. The image of herself craning high, head so far back her throat hurt, to stare through its slightly warped glass into a passing storm’s laid-open heart: all swirling sleet and pelting freezing rain, an endless spiral with gravity either suspended or overturned inside it, going both up and down at the same exact time. And then—”
― Max Booth III, Lost Films

“Dave once asked me if I ever sleep. He’s seen the blue glow of the television flickering in my window in the small hours of night. I tell him, yeah, the TV’s on, but only for background noise. It’s nice to have voices in the room other than my own. I can’t sleep through the night, and often wake to the pitch-black of solitude. The mind can go to bad places in the time it takes to reach the remote. “That would drive me crazy,” Dave told me, “all that racket.” What troubles me is the silence. Funny thing about the Lurking Man : He’s loudest in the dark. Throw on the light and he’s reduced to a whisper. Even the dimmest light is better than none. That, neighbor, is why I sleep with the TV on at night.”
― Max Booth III, Lost Signals

“People need to have the strength to push, the strength to search for not what they think they deserve, but what they do deserve.”
― Max Booth III, The Nightly Disease

“Last time he went on one of these rants and I tried asking him not to be such a racist, he called me a liberal snowflake. I didn’t even know how to respond to something so stupid, but he was positive he’d won the argument.”
― Max Booth III, We Need to Do Something

“That shape cannot exist properly because there is no heave and so it reverts to a single wavelength. So that these things can exist we preserve the wavelength but divorce it from these givens.”
― Max Booth III, Lost Signals

“We are each of us antennae, tuned to the deep. And deep calls to deep, over and under us, around us . . . through us. Jack Spicer proclaimed the poem no more for the poet than the song is for the radio. Sun Ra told us there are other worlds that wish to speak to us. Signals are everywhere, piercing our bodies—unheard broadcasts, coded transmissions, via a million unseen wavelengths—T waves, radio, the breath of distant stars. The breath of things behind the stars.”
― Max Booth III, Lost Signals

“I may have answered, but my voice is distant and muffled, like a drowning victim pleading for a fish’s help.”
― Max Booth III, The Nightly Disease

“The world moved on, with or without you.
The songs you grew up listening to became classics and then, before you knew it, those songs were replaced by other songs that didn’t come out until after you graduated college. Eventually those would be replaced, too. Everything was replaced.”
― Max Booth III

“liberal communists preaching socialism kale salads.”
― Max Booth III, We Need to Do Something

“People make mistakes. It’s what makes someone a person. How they recover from these mistakes is what divides a person between decency and wickedness.”
― Max Booth III, Touch the Night

“Soon, it’s past midnight, and we’re entering the small hours. The ones, the twos, the threes—we’re a long way from ten. The Lurking Man can show up any time of day, of course. But the small hours—this is where he lives. We’re in his home now, passing through in darkness like the moon crossing the ecliptic plane.”
― Max Booth III, Lost Signals

“A liquid clicking crackled from the speakers and then a horrible keening filled the air. It was a song sung by fleshless mouths, mandibles and teeth clicking together beneath a strange, warbling chant. The same as that sung by Inuit women while they circled a fire in which a man was cooked alive.”
― Max Booth III, Lost Signals

“Is this a dildo?” the cologne salesman says. Our heads slowly turn to the side, remembering the kid exists. He’s standing next to the Muzak station, holding a strap-on. A dildo hangs from it, staring at us menacingly. “This hotel is fucking weird, man,” Kia says.”
― Max Booth III, The Nightly Disease

“There are always concerns. Eating holes in your stomach. Scrambling your brain. Making your skin itch and itch and itch. Sometimes it feels like too much for a kid your age to handle. Sometimes it feels like too much for anybody of any age to handle. Sometimes it feels like this is all there is. All there will ever be.”
― Max Booth III, Abnormal Statistics

“I asked him when the free continental breakfast started in the morning and his eyes got really wide and he muttered something about the road to eternal damnation being paved with waffles.”
― Max Booth III, The Nightly Disease

“What do kids know of loneliness ? Enough. They may not understand it, but they recognize it when they see it. Maybe the poster itself is a giveaway—or maybe just the fact that a forty-year-old man would dress up in a costume and talk to children over the Internet for money. No wonder that kid was crying. Nobody wants to meet a sad Santa.”
― Max Booth III, Lost Signals

“It warms me to see her smile. Warms me like the whiskey in George’s flask. Maybe the world is not so miserable, but it probably is.”
― Max Booth III, The Nightly Disease

“The air smelled of popcorn, charred meat, wet animal fur.”
― Max Booth III, Lost Signals

“Even more confusing was the fact that Randy was one of those angry gay men who always seemed like they’d come from a party they hated, but yours was somehow worse, only Randy brought this vibe to his job every morning instead”
― Max Booth III, Lost Films

“Once I heard her refer to those tiny black heads people get on their faces and necks as “n-word babies”—only, she’d actually said the word. Of course, Dad had thought that was the funniest thing in the world. Thank god for cancer.”
― Max Booth III, We Need to Do Something