29 books
—
16 voters
“You will become way less concerned with what other people think of you when you realize how seldom they do.”
― Infinite Jest
― Infinite Jest
“so full of himself he could have shit limbs.”
― Infinite Jest
― Infinite Jest
“Ironic people always dissolve when confronted with earnestness, it's their kryptonite”
― Gone Girl
― Gone Girl
“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.”
―
―
“The public debate plays out in an infinite regress of blame over who’s responsible for those who fail to fit the standard erotic mold. This is variously ascribed to the people choosing to be the deviants they are, porn, the Devil (always a shoo-in), bad parents, poor role models, our sexually repressed culture, or the psychiatrists who keep needling sexual minorities by branding them mentally ill. It’s a rabbit hole of endless (and usually endlessly bad) arguments. Morally, all that matters—and allow me to reiterate that because I feel it’s quite important, all that matters—is whether a person’s sexual deviancy is demonstrably harmful. If it’s not, and we reject the person anyway, then we’re not the good guys in this scenario; we’re the bad guys.”
― Perv: The Sexual Deviant in All of Us
― Perv: The Sexual Deviant in All of Us
Ben Bromage’s 2024 Year in Books
Take a look at Ben Bromage’s Year in Books, including some fun facts about their reading.
More friends…
Polls voted on by Ben Bromage
Lists liked by Ben Bromage























