Will

“Unlike the rest of you, I cheerfully admit to my own utter selfishness. I am self-made, self-absorbed, self-serving, self-referential, even self-deprecating, in a charming sort of way. In short, I am all the selfs except selfless. Yet every so often I run across a force of nature that shakes my sublime self-centeredness to its very roots. Something that tears through the landscape like a tornado, leaving nothing but ruin and reexamination in its wake.”
― William Lashner, Falls the Shadow

“Adjacency to degeneracy means you get most of the fun without having to accept the consequences.”
― Lionel Shriver, A Better Life: A Novel

“Well, if you got Cynthia drunk enough, Cynthia thought, she would cop to wanting to do some good in the world, or at least to feel like her presence in it was value-added. How, though? Without some framework, some resources, even your secret aspirations just curdled into sentimental bullshit.”
― Jonathan Dee, The Privileges

“And still the handwritten letters keep coming, the words keep coming, the words a woman wants to hear. No dashed-off faxes from Trader. Faxes, which fade in six months, like contemporary love. No scrawled reminders propped against the toaster, such as I get from Tobe. And used to get from Deniss, from Jon, from Shawn, from Duwain. GET SOME TOILET PAPER FOR CHRIST SAKE. That wouldn’t do for Jennifer. She got a fucking poem every other day.”
― Martin Amis, Night Train