Sam Lipsyte Quotes

I'm a citizen of the republic of empathy.

Is this what Principal Fontana meant by the phrase 'well-rounded'?It’s fucking spherical, Catamounts.

You think everyone will stay behind and do everything you did all over again, forever. You picture old geezers in jean jackets doing whip-its behind the plaza.

Sam Lipsyte

The Rough Beast snorted. “You don’t get it at all, buddy. It’s not about wrestling. It’s about stories. We’re storytellers.”Caperton studied him. “Somebody at my job just said that.”“It’s true! You have to be able to tell the story to get people on board for anything. A soft drink, a suck sesh, elective surgery, gardening, even your thing--public space? I prefer private space, but that’s cool. Anyway, nobody cares about anything if there isn’t a story attached. Ask the team that wrote the Bible. Ask Vincent Allan Poe.”“But doesn’t it seem kind of creepy?” Caperton said. “All of us just going around calling ourselves storytellers?”The Rough Beast shrugged. “Well, you can be negative. That’s the easy way out.

Sam Lipsyte

It's hard to fuck your girlfriend when she's fucked up and you're not. It's harder than the skee-ball they used to have at the Plaza arcade, all that agony over a fuzzy piece.

Sam Lipsyte

Why do you think posers pose? Because they want to be invited to the dominion of the real. And they know their very desire for it disqualifies them.

Sam Lipsyte

You pay a whore to make you feel like a man, you fund a philharmonic to make yourself feel like a refined man.

Sam Lipsyte

I felt as though I were snorting cocaine, or rappelling down a cliffside, or cliffsurfing off a cliff of pure cocaine.

Sam Lipsyte

We’d been walking in endless rectangles and now we were near the candy store again. The lights were out, the security gate down. We leaned up against the wall of a bank and I could feel the cool stone on my back, the billions of dollars thrumming through wires beneath and behind me, or on the night waves above. I wasn’t quite sure how they traveled. Or how much they got out anymore.

Sam Lipsyte

Oh, do you, Milo? You’re so selfish. You don’t see the bigger picture.” “What’s the bigger picture?” “You’re still here looking for handouts. Who’s going to take care of me?” “I’m on my knees here, Mom. Not for me, for my family. For my wife. For a beautiful grandson you have totally ignored.” “He’s kind of a brat. I’ll be in his life when he gets a little impulse control.” “He’s not even four.” “I have needs. I’m tired of this child-worshipping culture. You’re just a slave to it, Milo.” “I’m only trying to be a decent dad.” “Don’t waste your time. It’s not in your genes. Besides, try making some money. That might be a good dad move. For heaven’s sake, the system’s rigged for white men and you still can’t tap in.” “You’re right, Mom. What can I say? But still, it would mean a lot to me if you made a little more of an effort with Bernie.” “Bernie schmernie. This is my decade.” “Okay, you wrinkled old spidercunt, have it your way.

Sam Lipsyte

Yes,” said Cooley. “That is the question, as the Bard might say.” “The Bard?” “What’s so funny?” said Cooley. “Nothing, sir,” I said. “I just didn’t know people still used that term.” “Well, I’m a people, Burke. Am I not?” “Of course.” “If you prick me, do I not bleed, you scat-gobbling, mother-rimming prick?” Occasionally Dean Cooley reverted to a vocabulary more suited to his marine years, but some maintained it was only when he felt threatened, or stretched for time. “Yes, sir,” I said.

Sam Lipsyte

Fuck,” said Bernie. “Fuckwinky eyeballhead.” “No, Bernie. We don’t use those words.” “Which words?” “You know which words.” “You used them, Daddy.” “I made a mistake. I am sorry I said that word. It isn’t helping with our problem.” “What’s our problem?” “There may be no school today.” “That’s okay,” said Bernie. “It’ll be okay.” We weren’t sure where he had picked up that becalming phrase, probably from us, as we tried to talk ourselves out of the awful lucidity certain days afforded. The whole mirthless dwindle of things would suddenly pull into focus, the crabbed, moneyless exhaustion that stood in for our lives, and Maura and I would both start the chatter, the cheap pep: It’s okay, it’s going to be okay, we’ll get through this. When Bernie repeated these bromides, he sounded seventy years old. It broke your heart, as did about forty-three percent of the things Bernie said and did. About twenty-seven percent of the things he said and did made you want to scream and banish him to his childproofed room, or do much more heinous and ingenious things, just so he’d get the point, whatever the point could be with an almost-four-year-old, but still, to bury him alive and then save him at the last minute, or tell him that the state had passed a law against ice cream and he would go to prison if he even thought about it, because they now had the technology to detect illegal mint-chocolate-chip cogitation, had, in fact, the chips for it, seemed, if not conducive to his development, at least on some level deserved. Thirty percent of what Bernie said and did was either on the bubble or else utterly inscrutable, just the jolts and stutters of a factory-fresh brain working out the kinks.

Sam Lipsyte

So, yes, I should have just surrendered, cinched the entitled scion her little pouch of entitlements, put in my calls to the name shufflers, done my duty. I thought about that moment later on. Maybe I got extratuned to the concept of bitchhood once I became Purdy’s, though I must confess I’ve always found such usage of the term for female dogs distasteful. My mother was a second-wave feminist. I wasn’t comfortable saying “cunt” until I was twenty-three, at which point, admittedly, I couldn’t hold back for a time.

Sam Lipsyte

She liked reality shows the best, and then the shows that purported to be about reality.

Sam Lipsyte

You said you were having a dream.” “It’s true, I did.” “Was it the one where you’re inside the girl and you are pumping her and pumping her and you are so happy but then it turns out it’s not a girl, it’s really one of those super poisonous box jellyfish, and it stings you and you are screaming and screaming and the sky rains the diarrhea of babies?” “The . . . no, I don’t think so.” “I get that sometimes. Anyway, see you around.

Sam Lipsyte

They sought each other, missed each other, at cocktail parties, in train terminals, at flower shops, their fin de siecle Nokias gaining symbolic power with each scene.

Sam Lipsyte

They weren’t like dolls, because dolls had no feelings. Kids had feelings, just not any remotely related to yours.

Sam Lipsyte

I was also one of those people who hadn’t caught up with the latest social networking site. Maura belonged to most of them. She passed most evenings befriending men who had tried to date-rape her in high school, but I was still stuck in the last virtual community, a sad place to be, like Europe, say, during the Black Death. Whenever I cruised this site, with its favorites lists and its paeans to somebody’s cousin’s gas station art gallery, I could not help but think of medieval corpses in the spring-thaw mud, buboes sprouted in every armpit and anus, black bile curling out of frozen mouths. Those of us still cursed with life wandered the blasted dales of this stricken network, wept and moaned and flogged ourselves with frayed AC adaptors, called out for God to strike us dead, or else let us find somebody who liked similar bands.

Sam Lipsyte

We are going to eat ice cream and we are going to eat shit. The trick is to use different spoons.

Sam Lipsyte

How much I'd always envied the tight life of voles. The hidey hole was happiness.

Sam Lipsyte

I'm finding that the older I get, it's not that I learn new things, it's more like I find out how much of what I know is common knowledge.

Sam Lipsyte

Judging by your face, the what-the-fuck nodes in your cerebral cortex must be a real light show.

Sam Lipsyte