Silas Heilbron

“Rust is the failure of the work of man. The project, the venture, the experiment: failed, given up on, and not cleaned up after.”
― Martin Amis, House of Meetings

“I never saw such crazy musicians. Everybody in Frisco blew. It was the end of the continent; they didn't give a damn.”
― Jack Kerouac, On the Road

“There are many accounts, uniformly incomplete, of what it is like to die slowly. But there is no information at all about what it is like to die suddenly and violently. We are being gentle when we describe such deaths as instant. 'The passengers died instantly.' Did they? It may be that some people can do it, can die instantly. The very old, because the vital powers are weak; the very young, because there is no great accretion of experience needing to be scattered. Muhammad Atta was 33. As for him (and perhaps this is true even in cases of vaporisation; perhaps this was true even for the wall-shadows of Japan), it took much longer than an instant. By the time the last second arrived, the first second seemed as far away as childhood...Even as his flesh fried and his blood boiled, there was life, kissing its fingertips. Then it echoed out, and ended.”
― Martin Amis, The Second Plane: September 11, 2001-2007

“There are worse things than finding your wife and child dead.
You can watch the world do it. You can watch your wife get old and bored. You can watch your kids discover everything in the world you've tried to save them from. Drugs, divorce, conformity, disease. All the nice clean books, music, television. Distraction.”
― Chuck Palahniuk, Lullaby