Joshua Ferris > Quotes

“All broken hearts are circumstantial. Every lovelorn jerk is the victim of bad timing, good intentions, and someone else’s poor decision making.”
― Joshua Ferris, Then We Came to the End

“I know what to do with my life. I just don't know what to do with this one night.”
― Joshua Ferris, Then We Came to the End

“Yet for all the depression no one ever quit. When someone quit, we couldn't believe it. 'I'm becoming a rafting instructor on the Colorado River,' they said. 'I'm touring college towns with my garage band.' We were dumbfounded. It was like they were from another planet. Where had they found the derring-do? What would they do about car payments? We got together for going away drinks on their final day and tried to hide our envy while reminding ourselves that we still had the freedom and luxury to shop indiscriminately.”
― Joshua Ferris, Then We Came to the End

“We loved killing time and had perfected several ways of doing so. We wandered the hallways carrying papers that indicated some mission of business when in reality we were in search of free candy. ”
― Joshua Ferris, Then We Came to the End

“She looks at herself in the mirror. The idea is to look sexy again. And for whom exactly? Yourself, of course. Yes, well, that's all wonderfully self-affirming and very strong-minded as any decent woman should be these days, but let's just face facts here and say that when a woman - no, when a person is thinking about feeling sexy, it is always with the idea of someone else in mind. ”
― Joshua Ferris, Then We Came to the End

“To conform is to lose your soul”
― Joshua Ferris, Then We Came to the End

“Of course I alienate myself from society. It's the only way I know of not being constantly reminded of all the ways I'm alienated from society.”
― Joshua Ferris, To Rise Again at a Decent Hour

“We told him to get on with it. We liked wasting time, but almost nothing was more annoying than having our wasted time wasted on something not worth wasting it on.”
― Joshua Ferris

“almost nothing was more annoying than having our wasted time wasted on something not worth wasting it on”
― Joshua Ferris, Then We Came to the End

“I was already at one remove before the Internet came along. I need another remove? Now I have to spend the time that I'm not doing the thing they're doing reading about them doing it? Streaming the clips of them doing it, commenting on how lucky they are to be doing all those things, liking and digging and bookmarking and posting and tweeting all those things, and feeling more disconnected than ever? Where does this idea of greater connection come from? I've never in my life felt more disconnected. It's like how the rich get richer. The connected get more connected while the disconnected get more disconnected. No thanks man, I can't do it. The world was a sufficient trial, Betsy, before Facebook.”
― Joshua Ferris, To Rise Again at a Decent Hour

“There was so much unpleasantness in the workaday world. The last thing you ever wanted to do at night was go home and do the dishes. And just the idea that part of the weekend had to be dedicated to getting the oil changed and doing the laundry was enough to make those of us still full from lunch want to lie down in the hallway and force anyone dumb enough to remain committed to walk around us. It might not be so bad. They could drop food down to us, or if that was not possible, crumbs from their PowerBars and bags of microwave popcorn surely would end up within an arm's length sooner or later. The cleaning crews, needing to vacuum, would inevitably turn us on our sides, preventing bedsores, and we would make little toys out of runs in the carpet, which, in moments of extreme regression, we might suck on for comfort.”
― Joshua Ferris, Then We Came to the End

“They were like two inviolable spheres touching at a fine point in their curves, touching but failing to penetrate, failing to breathe the other's air.”
― Joshua Ferris, The Unnamed

“We were fractious and overpaid. Our mornings lacked promise. At least those of us who smoked had something to look forward to at ten-fifteen.”
― Joshua Ferris, Then We Came to the End

“It is really irritating to work with irritating people”
― Joshua Ferris, Then We Came to the End

“A child, thought Carl, is not the only result of childbirth. A mother, too, is born. You see them every day--nondescript women with a bulge just above the groin, slightly double-chinned. Perpetually forty. Someone's mother, you think. There is a child somewhere who has made this woman into a mother, and for the sake of the child she has altered her appearance to better play the part.”
― Joshua Ferris, Then We Came to the End

“It is forgivable to say nothing out of ignorance; it's inexcusable to remain silent once awareness dawns.”
― Joshua Ferris, To Rise Again at a Decent Hour

“Some days felt longer than other days. Some days felt like two whole days. Unfortunately those days were never weekend days. Our Saturdays and Sundays passed in half the time of a normal workday. In other words, some weeks it felt like we worked ten straight days and had only one day off.”
― Joshua Ferris, Then We Came to the End

“Everything was always something, but something—and here was the rub—could never be everything.”
― Joshua Ferris, To Rise Again at a Decent Hour

“We had the great good fortune and shortcomings of character that marked every generation that had never seen war.”
― Joshua Ferris, Then We Came to the End

“We found ourselves wanting to hurry time along, which was not in the long run good for our health. Everybody was trapped in this contradiction but nobody ever dared to articulate it.”
― Joshua Ferris, Then We Came to the End

“Baseball is the slow creation of something beautiful. It is the almost boringly paced accumulation of what seems slight or incidental into an opera of bracing suspense. The game will threaten never to end, until suddenly it forces you to marvel at how it came to be where it is and to wonder at how far it might go. It’s the drowsy metamorphosis of the dull into the indescribable.”
― Joshua Ferris, To Rise Again at a Decent Hour

“People have all this resentment against their parents for fucking them up, but they never realize, the minute they have a kid, that they cease being the child so fondly victimized in their hearts and start being the benighted perpetrators of unfathomable pain.”
― Joshua Ferris, To Rise Again at a Decent Hour

“Why shouldn't it be that way for the rest of us? Why not just go with it? Just walk the dog and send the tweets and eat the scones and play with the hamsters and ride the bicycles and watch the sunsets and stream the movies and never worry about any of it? I didn't know it could be that easy. I didn't know that until just now. That sounds good to me.”
― Joshua Ferris, To Rise Again at a Decent Hour

“We suffered failures of imagination just like everyone else, our daring was wanting, and our daily contentment too nearly adequate for us to give it up.”
― Joshua Ferris, Then We Came to the End

“If you can get by with quotes from The Godfather and nothing you say matters, that's pretty bleak, don't you think? Don't we want what we say to matter?”
― Joshua Ferris, Then We Came to the End

“One thing we knew for certain- despite all our certainties, it was very difficult to guess what one individual was thinking at any given moment.”
― Joshua Ferris

“It was madness to leave without your useless shit. You came in with it, you left with it--that was how it worked. What would you use to clutter a new office with if not your useless shit? We could remember Old Brizz with this box of useless shit, shifting the box from arm to arm as he talked with the building guy. Of course, Old Brizz never had an office again. His useless shit really was useless. He had cause to leave his useless shit behind. But his was a rare case. All things considered, it was better to take your useless shit with you.”
― Joshua Ferris, Then We Came to the End

“It happened all the time. Maybe someone had a legitimate gripe that deserved airing. Maybe someone had a compliment that shouldn't go unspoken. No one said a thing. So long and stay in touch, that's usually all we said. Take care of yourself, good luck. We said nothing about affection, appreciation, admiration.”
― joshua ferris, Then We Came to the End

“Hank Nearly was an avid reader. He arrived early in his brown corduroy coat, with a book taken from the library, copied all the pages on the Xerox machine, and sat at his desk reading what looked passebly like the honest pages of business. He's make it through a three-hundred-page novel every two or three days.”
― Joshua Ferris, Then We Came to the End

“If you hate the Yankees so much,” Connie asked me, “why did you move to New York?” “To find out what kind of city could make a monster like a Yankees fan.”
― Joshua Ferris, To Rise Again at a Decent Hour