Patrick Cottrell > Quotes

“Why wouldn’t anyone admit that a life is not a life but a deathward existence?”
― Patrick Cottrell

“Pragmatic, I have always preferred to be in the background, unobserved; I preferred to play the role of the detached observer/receiver, the way one would live if one lived and spoke and shat inside a puffy white cloud floating along above the world harmlessly like a balloon.”
― Patrick Cottrell

“The first thing you can do to contain your life is to just stop buying things.”
― Patrick Cottrell

“Perhaps he saw swarms and machinic assemblages everywhere. Who wants to see that?”
― Patrick Cottrell

“Perhaps part of the problem was I had surrounded myself with the fiction writers instead of the poets. I had chosen the wrong world to immerse myself in; the poets were nightclub docents of mourning and melancholia and the fiction writers were real estate agents.”
― Patrick Cottrell, Afternoon Hours of a Hermit

“I only knew time existed because as the years went on, my flesh slackened and my muscles ached. It was as if my bones were wearing some kind of flesh muumuu. Time itself is nothing but a construction to organize and measure flesh decay.”
― Patrick Cottrell

“During difficult times, that's what we turn to. We'll always have ice cream and chocolate fountains, she said in a deeply philosophical way.”
― Patrick Cottrell, Afternoon Hours of a Hermit

“I preferred to align with the ones who believe writing is like standing on one side of an ancient forest and on the other side is everyone you've ever known, the living, the dead, waiting to say things to you.”
― Patrick Cottrell, Afternoon Hours of a Hermit

“I could kill a dog with a brick! I shouted to no one when I was done.”
― Patrick Cottrell , Sorry to Disrupt the Peace

“Time itself is nothing but a construction to organize and measure flesh decay.”
― Patrick Cottrell

“One day a very tall woman with excellent posture came into the store. She asked me what I wanted to do with my life. I said I want to go to as many Fiona Apple concerts as possible, I wanted to follow Fiona Apple around on tour.”
― Patrick Cottrell, Afternoon Hours of a Hermit

“How could a person write five hundred pages of this banal vulgarity and I could hardly get to one hundred pages about my little bumblebee pooping on the rug?”
― Patrick Cottrell, Afternoon Hours of a Hermit

“He was comfortable anywhere he was not forced to confront his own physical discomfort with being alive.”
― Patrick Cottrell

“I don't know how we can be sure what we are to anyone, I remembered thinking, even if we ask them directly, there's no way to know.”
― Patrick Cottrell, Afternoon Hours of a Hermit

“As I paged through the senior portraits, I became enchanted by all of the mocking and bitter faces. Everyone was broken and ruinous.”
― Patrick Cottrell