Steve Toltz

"Let me save you some time. There is no bottom. Despair is bottomless. Youll never get there, and thats why I know youll never kill yourself. Not you. Only those attached to the trivial things take their own lives, but you never will. You see, a person who reveres life and family and all that stuff, hell be the first to put his neck in a noose, but those who dont think too highly of their loves and possessions, those who know too well the lack of purpose of it all, theyre the ones who cant so it. Do you know what irony is? Well, you just heard one. If you believe in immortality, you can kill yourself, but if you feel that life is a brief flicker between two immense voids to which humanity is unfairly condemned, you wouldnt dare. Look, Marty, youre in an untenable situation. You dont have the resources to live a full life, yet you cant bring yourself to die. So what do you do?"

"After all, memory may be the only thing on earth we can truly manipulate to serve us, so we dont have to look back at ourselves in the receding past and think, What an arsehole!"

"You never hear about a sportsman losing his sense of smell in a tragic accident, and for good reason; in order for the universe to teach excruciating lessons that we are unable to apply in later life, the sportsman must lose his legs, the philosopher his mind, the painter his eyes, the musician his ears, the chef his tongue."

"Confronting your own assassin is a tricky business; you dont want to trigger your own murder just for the sake of getting something off your chest."

"Even ugly people know beauty when they dont see it."

"No one listened to me. Caroline and I stood together as they dragged Terry away to a mental asylum. I looked at my parents incredulously, at their inexorably tepid souls. All I could do was uselessly shake a clenched fist and think how people are so eager to become slaves that its unbelievable. Christ. Sometimes they throw off their freedom so quickly, youd think it was burning them."

"Lets not beat around the bush: human feelings can be ridiculous. Thinking back to that moment, to how I felt at the realization that my stepfather was slowly murdering me, I did not feel anger. I did not feel outrage. I felt hurt. Thats right. That this man who Id lived with my whole life, the man who married my mother and was for all practical purposes my father, was maliciously poisoning me to death hurt my feelings. Ridiculous!"

"To have a child is to be impaled daily on the spike of responsibility."

"Sometimes I think the human animal doesnt really need food or water to survive, only gossip."

"It would be easy enough to get my hands on a gun. You only had to open a cupboard at Harrys or plunge your hand deep into the sugar bowl to find a semiautomatic. Of course, I despised guns and all the baggage that went along with them, like bullet wounds and death, but on the other hand, I liked the idea of breaking another one of the Ten Commandments, especially since I didnt honor my father either. They couldnt very well force you to suffer for two eternities, could they?"

"Most of my life I never worked out whether to pity, ignore, adore, judge, or murder my father. His mystifying behavior left me wavering right up until the end."

"I took a step closer to the edge. High in the trees I could hear the sounds of birds. They werent chirping, they were just moving around making everything rustle. Down near the earth brown beetles were rummaging in the dirt, not thinking about death. It didnt seem to me Id be missing out on much. Existence is humiliating anyway. If Someone was watching us build, decay, create, degenerate, believe, and wither as we do, hed never stop laughing. So why not? What do I know about suicide? Only that it is a melodramatic act, as well as an admission that the heat is too hot so Im getting out of this crazy kitchen. And why shouldnt a fourteen-year-old commit suicide? Sixteen-year-olds do it all the time. Maybe Im just ahead of my time. Why shouldnt I end it all?"