Adam Sternbergh > Quotes

“No matter what you have, or how lucky you think you are, there’s nothing in this world you can hold on to so tightly that it can’t be taken from you.”
― Adam Sternbergh, Shovel Ready

“You’ll leave a trail of trash on this Earth that will far exceed anything of worth you leave behind. For every ounce of heirloom, you leave a ton of landfill.”
― Adam Sternbergh, Shovel Ready

“It all seemed so absurd to him: that a life comprising so many accumulated years could be interrupted with such indifferent swiftness. The fundamental fragility of it all.”
― Adam Sternbergh, The Blinds

“People get upset when you say you kill people. Fair enough.”
― Adam Sternbergh, Shovel Ready

“when only poor people use something, no one takes care of it. Roads, schools, neighborhoods. Subways too.”
― Adam Sternbergh, Shovel Ready

“So strange don't you think? To ascend to such a high position in your lifetime and then be totally forgotten? I mean, who even remembers Schuyler Colfax? Or John C. Breckinridge?'
'The history boooks do.”
― Adam Sternbergh, The Blinds

“now, smeared with sweat from where it’s been bouncing and rubbing lightly against his thigh. He taps the phone alive. It lights up brightly, eager to be of service. He swipes. No bars. Of course. He turns around and around in a tight little circle, back and forth like a malfunctioning toy, searching, shaking the phone hopelessly, trying to activate a signal, awaken the gods, but he knows, he knows. He’s in a dead zone. He pauses another moment, thinking, searching for that one smart revelation he’s certain is just waiting to alight, but when it doesn’t, when he finds he’s stuck on the same dumb options—run this way, run that way, hope for the best—he stows the contraband phone back in his swimming trunks pocket and finally admits to himself that he has no idea where in the world he is or the first clue how to get back home.”
― Adam Sternbergh, The Eden Test

“In [this] person, he had, bewilderingly, and for the first time ever, collided with another living soul whose continued existence on this earth he valued more than his own. Was that love? If so, then yes, they were in love.”
― Adam Sternbergh, The Blinds

“Isn’t that the definition of morality? Your personal list of will- and won’t-dos?”
― Adam Sternbergh, The Eden Test

“There's nothing special about this place, he thinks. We all forget. Then we forget what we forgot. And that's how we survive.”
― Adam Sternbergh, The Blinds

“For unto you is given this day a boot to the head.”
― Adam Sternbergh, Shovel Ready

“Every fourteen year old a supermodel, every forty year old still trying to pass for a teen. My Little Pony backpacks used to be a reliable indicator. Same with heels and belly piercings. No more.”
― Adam Sternbergh, Shovel Ready

“Let’s set the bar for ideas a little higher than not terrible.”
― Adam Sternbergh, Shovel Ready

“The thought of just how inadequate the body's natural defenses --skull, bone, brain-- were in the face of the advanced physics-- lead, gun-powder, momentum -- of invented death. It all seemed so absurd to him: that a life comprising so many accumulated years could be interrupted with such indifferent swiftness.”
― Adam Sternbergh, The Blinds

“Come nuclear winter, Hacky Sacks will prevail. A lone sack, being hackyed, on some burnt-out horizon. We’ll know civilization, and jam bands, survived.”
― Adam Sternbergh, Shovel Ready

“Damnatio Memorae: the Condemnation of Memory.”
― Adam Sternbergh, The Blinds

“There’s nothing special about this place, he thinks. We all forget. Then we forget what we forgot. And that’s how we survive.”
― Adam Sternbergh, The Blinds

“Thirty-three years later, members of Generation X...still dressed exactly like the children they were now raising.”
― Adam Sternbergh

“New York. The greatest concentration of human potential in the history of the world. So much so that they had to start piling the people one on top of the other. An island so crowded it had nowhere to go but up.”
― Adam Sternbergh, Shovel Ready

“For every ounce of heirloom, you leave a ton of landfill.”
― Adam Sternbergh, Shovel Ready

“That’s what happens when you wipe out a big chunk of a person’s memories: Fear breeds in the empty space that’s left behind.”
― Adam Sternbergh, The Blinds

“Here’s to the person you might have been, and to the person you have become. May they never meet in a dark alley.”
― Adam Sternbergh, The Blinds

“Adam chose to eat the apple, which means he chose to die for Eve. That's the simple truth. He chose to die with her in an imperfect world rather than live forever in Paradise without her.

Why? Because he loved her. Because she was part of him. They didn't choose wickedness. They chose each other.

Now that's a love story. That's a happy ending. Isn't that the kind of love you want?”
― Adam Sternbergh, The Eden Test

“And fifty, he knows, is the moment in life when you stop looking forward and wondering what kind of person you might become, and start looking backward and wondering how you became the person you are.”
― Adam Sternbergh, The Blinds

“the only reward for the triumphant rat is a bigger, trickier maze.”
― Adam Sternbergh, The Blinds

“[She] sees. She knows. She understands. About evil, or whatever you care to name it. It comes. It's relentless. It doesn't care if you forgot it. It searches, and it finds you, and it arrives on your doorstep one day, and it lights up a screen, it calls you by your real name, it smiles at you, it says hello, it eyes your son and promises to take him home.”
― Adam Sternbergh, The Blinds

“I used to love Bugs Bunny cartoons as a kid. Wascally wabbit.

Hated the Coyote though. Really hated the Road Runner.

That was some pointless desert bullshit.”
― Adam Sternbergh, Near Enemy

“I may have once had some thin faith in something like cosmic justice, but now I believe in box-cutters.”
― Adam Sternbergh, Shovel Ready

“promised”
― Adam Sternbergh, The Eden Test

“No headstones for anyone, though. No official markers. Let each of the dead decide in the next life what name they choose to go by.”
― Adam Sternbergh, The Blinds