Jeff

“My father had left me with the words, “My lad, the world is now your oyster.” And indeed it was: grey, rather slimy, and a sense of something fishy going on in the background that I couldn’t quite put my finger on.”
― Andrew Biss, The End of the World

“The so-called ‘psychotically depressed’ person who tries to kill herself doesn’t do so out of quote ‘hopelessness’ or any abstract conviction that life’s assets and debits do not square. And surely not because death seems suddenly appealing. The person in whom Its invisible agony reaches a certain unendurable level will kill herself the same way a trapped person will eventually jump from the window of a burning high-rise. Make no mistake about people who leap from burning windows. Their terror of falling from a great height is still just as great as it would be for you or me standing speculatively at the same window just checking out the view; i.e. the fear of falling remains a constant. The variable here is the other terror, the fire’s flames: when the flames get close enough, falling to death becomes the slightly less terrible of two terrors. It’s not desiring the fall; it’s terror of the flames. And yet nobody down on the sidewalk, looking up and yelling ‘Don’t!’ and ‘Hang on!’, can understand the jump. Not really. You’d have to have personally been trapped and felt flames to really understand a terror way beyond falling.”
― David Foster Wallace

“What if each of his possibilities was good? One was best but each was good and even if he chose one that wasn’t the best, God could make it the best.”
― Bill Dodds, Pope Bob

“Sometimes people simply say things to make someone else feel better. It doesn’t make it true, it just makes it appropriate.”
― Andrew Biss, The End of the World