David Burr Gerrard > Quotes

“Thinking, like other drugs, can be a useful distraction from pain, as long as it's managed and doesn't become an addiction.”
― David Burr Gerrard, The Epiphany Machine

“That’s what nobody admits about men, how needy they are.”
― David Burr Gerrard, Short Century

“I'm saying that figuring out what's important in life and how to go about getting it is very difficult. Sometimes you get confused and you get tempted to just let other people make the rules. And some people are really happy to make the rules for other people. Adam Lyons, the man who runs the epiphany machine, is one of those people.”
― David Burr Gerrard, The Epiphany Machine

“Don’t go to the protest. Go out and get laid. Unless you’re going to the protest to get laid.”
― David Burr Gerrard, Short Century

“You already know what the machine will write on your arm. That lie you’ve been telling yourself—you know what it is. That blind spot is not really a blind spot—you’re choosing to look away. Perhaps more to the point, you already know whether you want to see it. You already know whether you’re going to use the machine. So why are you still reading this?”
― David Burr Gerrard, The Epiphany Machine

“Subtle! Subtlety is bourgeois. Brecht us that when he popped drama’s cherry. He fucked drama until it stopped being subtle, like a lady, and started being useful, like a whore.”
― David Burr Gerrard, Short Century

“One way to think about your life is as an extended free fall. An epiphany may help you see better as you fall. Rather than a meaningless blur, you will see rocks and trees and lizards. An epiphany is not a parachute.”
― David Burr Gerrard, The Epiphany Machine

“Maybe Julie, I mean my new Julie, my Jewish Julie, I mean my wife, isn't quite as right for me as the other Julie was. She doesn't challenge me as much, we don't laugh as much, and our sex isn't as good. But this Julie challenges me almost as much, we laugh almost as much, and our sex is...fine. Julie and I might have been a little happier than Julie and I, but Julie and I are still happy.”
― David Burr Gerrard, The Epiphany Machine

“The epiphany machine will not discover anything about you that you do not, in some way, already know. But think for a moment about surprise. What is surprising is never what is revealed but the grace with which it has been hidden.”
― David Burr Gerrard, The Epiphany Machine

“The things white men failed to notice would fill the world they had ruined ten thousand times over.”
― David Burr Gerrard, The Epiphany Machine

“I think that we were both wrong. I think that Arthur had sex with his sister to create a short century.”
“Daddy, what are you talking about?”
“He was trying to end something, and by ending it start something totally new.”
― David Burr Gerrard, Short Century

“That was what maturity was: accepting things. The more things you accepted, the more mature you were.”
― David Burr Gerrard, Short Century

“She pulled down my pants and boxers in one unbroken movement, an act that felt as abrupt and strange as this entire afternoon, but as soon as she put my penis in her mouth, I was very glad that I had accompanied her home.”
― David Burr Gerrard, The Epiphany Machine

“Praising heroes who slay monsters is a writer’s most ancient task.”
― David Burr Gerrard, Short Century

“The twentieth will be a short century,” he said. “Either we or the Soviets will launch the missiles before long, and all the lies will be burned away.”
― David Burr Gerrard, Short Century

“Accepting punishment – that would be revolutionary.”
― David Burr Gerrard, Short Century

“Don’t you wonder sometimes,” Miranda asked, “whether women have all the power or no power at all?”
― David Burr Gerrard, Short Century

“The months after the fall of the Wall constituted one of the few points in history when the past seemed to lead to the future, rather than the reverse. Historians would later mark it as the end of the twentieth century, the period dominated by murderous plans to perfect the world, the ‘short century’ of 1914 to 1989.”
― David Burr Gerrard, Short Century

“I had always thought that vaginas, with their flaps and folds, looked somehow unfinished.”
― David Burr Gerrard, Short Century

“You could fling open every closet of regret and desire in yourself and the people you loved, and still there would be one closet you missed, and crouched in that closet, never to see the dark of day, would be your most crucial self.”
― David Burr Gerrard, Short Century

“Arthur, do you think the fall of the Wall means anything? Do you think that this means that even one fewer body will burn?”
― David Burr Gerrard, Short Century

“The problem with freedom is that when people have it, they do what they want to.”
― David Burr Gerrard, Short Century

“Christianity has always been the Gestapo of desire, since long, long before there was a Gestapo. Instead of Jews to hate, Christianity has desire. Though I guess Christianity has Jews, too. In any case, all the ovens in the world can’t incinerate desire.”
― David Burr Gerrard, Short Century

“See,” Miranda said, “this is the truth.” Sitting in class one morning, I found her pubic hair in my teeth.”
― David Burr Gerrard, Short Century

“Men do everything that men do, from waging war to reading books, for one purpose only: to get laid.”
― David Burr Gerrard, Short Century

“It’s something of a cliché, at least among war correspondents, that war makes people unusually horny; what it actually does is make you want to touch as much flesh as you can get your hands on.”
― David Burr Gerrard, Short Century

“I was afraid you would deny me three times before your cock grows.”
― David Burr Gerrard, Short Century

“He wanted to be king and was the last to learn that to be a king was a thing of nothing”
― David Burr Gerrard, The Epiphany Machine

“Journalists of late seem too eager to change the world in various ways; the point is to describe it, accurately and carefully.”
― David Burr Gerrard, Short Century

“He says that politics is a waste of time. Politics are? Politics is? Anyway, a waste of time. He says you should focus on your own sexual gratification.”
― David Burr Gerrard, Short Century