J. Robert Lennon > Quotes

“She had the scattered feeling she always got when events conspired to mess things up, and nothing exhausted and frustrated her more than a mess she was incapable of fixing.”
― J. Robert Lennon, The Light of Falling Stars

“What she wanted was really two things: to be elsewhere, and to be somebody else. Or at least a version of herself that had made better decisions, that had thought more clearly. ”
― J. Robert Lennon, The Light of Falling Stars

“People, in my long experience, want to talk. They may believe they wish to keep secrets, and they may believe that they are capable of doing so. But the truth is that secrets exist to be revealed; and it is usually very easy to find the combination of words that will cause them to emerge.”
― J. Robert Lennon, Castle

“My sister stood up, trembling, and I must admit that I expected her familiar sneer to have taken its usual place on her face. But all I could find there was unhappiness and fear. Fear of my reaction, perhaps. But when a person has lived a life like hers, a life of promiscuity, rootlessness, and substance abuse, resentment and fear tend to replace all reasonable and proper emotions, and the world becomes your enemy.”
― J. Robert Lennon, Castle

“Her doctoral dissertation was to have been on the “saturation hypothesis,” a theory of her own devising which held that every word in a work of literature, far from having one or two most likely meanings, meant everything that any reader could make of it, and that each supposed meaning was of equal value to all others. This theory, she said, dovetailed with other current literary theories that gave more power to critics and less to writers, who tended to write with finite intentions.”
― J. Robert Lennon, Pieces for the Left Hand: Stories

“This was not the state of mind I was accustomed to, at the outset of an expedition. But one does not fight the battles he wishes to fight; he fights the battles that find him. I would do my best to ignore my foul mood and physical discomfort, and plunge ahead as I had planned.”
― J. Robert Lennon, Castle

“To survive being a parent is to fictionalize memory - to constantly re-create and re-contextualize the past, to invent a narrative that makes sense of the bizarre distortions introduced into one's life under the strain of responsibility, obligation, and love.”
― J. Robert Lennon

“It is so much like a movie, Irina can't stand it.”
― J. Robert Lennon, Broken River

“I won't be the first man to spend his life barely alive, he told himself. Men did it. It was no great feat. He would live--he'd live a few scant miles from the heart of life, on its chill periphery. That suited him after all.”
― J. Robert Lennon, On the Night Plain

“At least things fucking happen in those books, she thought: it's not just people lying in bed and thinking about their fucking feelings.”
― J. Robert Lennon, Broken River

“So he left, and found no passion, and returned to nothing at all.”
― J. Robert Lennon, On the Night Plain

“All the stories we tell ourselves are wrong.”
― J. Robert Lennon, Broken River

“Prose, my medium of choice, is particularly well equipped to handle the interiority that we swim through as conscious beings. As you read these words, you are allowing me to occupy a sacred space that is normally just for you. Allowing me to let my mind take a front seat in your mind and drive the thing for a few moments. It’s a gracious miracle.”
― J. Robert Lennon, Critical Hits: Writers Playing Video Games