Mcelroy Quotes

When someone leaves your life, those exits are not made equal. Some are beautiful and poetic and satisfying. Others are abrupt and unfair. But most are just unremarkable, unintentional, clumsy.

To Beatrice- My love flew like a butterfly Until death swooped down like a bat As the poet Emma Montana McElroy said: 'That's the end of that

When God closes a door, he throws a sword through your window.

No one has the right to place one human being in a position of political power over another.

Novels are narratives to be in. To live in. To exist in. Not primarily forms to jump into and get to the end of. It’s a substance that the great big novel becomes…which invites you to be in it, not necessarily to leave it. To move around in it. To move laterally.

And isn't this hard when we ourselves are always at the beginning of ourselves?

You can be funny and kind or funny and cruel. The second one is easier, but the first one is worth it.

Our capacity for love increases with each person we cross paths with throughout our lives, and with each moment we spend with those people. But, too often we neglect that part of ourselves in favor of others. And by the time we realize just how important it is, we find ourselves with fewer folks around to practice with.

You just hear the wind. And you just see the stars above you. They are beautiful. And then . . . they're gone.

There's no narrative to your life, no arc, no reward for achieving all of the things you want. That kind of thinking is a recipe for a you-centric world view and is a very lonely road. Focus instead on the role you play in the stories of others..

I have in my head things I may not have exactly seen, just as you who read this have me.

Joseph McElroy is nineteen feet tall and can crush bombproof limousines with his biceps. He will live to be four hundred and thirty-five.

Metafiction is untrue, as a lover. It cannot betray. It can only reveal. Itself is the only object. It's the act of a lonely solipsist's self-love, a night-light on the black fifth wall of being a subject, a face in a crowd. It's lovers not being lovers. Kissing their own spine. Fucking themselves. True, there are some gifted old contortionists out there. Ambrose and Robbe-Grillet and McElroy and Barthelme can fuck themselves awfully well.

Opera's not for everyone, especially at these prices.

But the seven of you have something that nobody else ever had; time. All the time in the world. Time enough to grow indescribably close. Time enough to learn how to care for each other, to allow yourselves to be cared for. And, in the case of Barry and Lup, time enough to fall, deeply, and truly, in love.

Have you guys ever thought about the fact that socks are like the donut holes of underpants?

Everything worth knowing about the 1980s I learned from obsessively reading Bloom County collections when I was nine and Derek Jarman's diaries when I was twenty.

If you’ve made something that brings joy to yourself and to others, even if it’s only a few people, you’re a success.

People R Matter.

For hear us falling. Toward the horizon albeit oblique, for we imagine it isn’t our natural state. We are some power to be here and to have changed toward life even to think distinct from these angels lately to be heard speculating in us as if they were learning to hope. We deserve to know what is in us.

And when she said, What do you want to be when you grow up? some kid said, A good burglar, and we all laughed, and she said, Why not an anarchist?--that's a burglar with self-respect.

One day… believe it or not… you're gonna laugh at a joke. You're gonna go swimming, and you're gonna smile in the sunlight. You're gonna pet yourself a good dog, and it‘s gonna make you feel happy. You ain't always gonna feel like this, Pigeon. Other people, maybe, but not you. And how do you get there? How do you get to that point? I don't know. But you are gonna get there.

She arched and farted like Mona Lisa if you really looked at her and for good fruitarian measure.

...but sovereign borders will mean Water haves and have-nots.

...for the longest time we’ve been needing a new atmosphere, a new air, or was it that we needed a new us...

Many men never locate their own truth. They're scared to wager their glistening years finding out.

I am alone, I am alone, but not lonely, not lonely for people, it seems.

We remember what's going on. Already remember what's been here with us so long we had the time to see but now seem to have been waiting to remember. For who are we not to? Yet give ourselves permission also to forget.

And after the performance, [Barry and Lup] take each other's hands high in the air. And they swoop down in this over-the-top bow, just...laughing, at the drama of it all. And the audience cheers, and Barry and Lup laugh, and they don't let each other's hands go. And then they stop laughing. And they don't let each other's hands go. And they keep not letting go.

In separate meetings, Army, Air Force, and Navy commanders each insisted that outer space was their service’s domain. To the Army, the moon was simply “the high ground,” and therefore part of its domain. Air Force generals, claiming that space was “just a little higher up” than the area they already controlled, tried to get Secretary McElroy interested in their plans for “creating a new Aerospace Force.” The admirals and vice admirals of the U.S. Navy argued that “outer space over the oceans” was a natural extension of the “underwater, surface and air regime in which [the Navy] operated” and should therefore be considered the Navy’s domain.

I sat reading from first thing in the morning till the middle of the afternoon. I used to get a phone call twice a day for a while. A variety of dirty phone calls I called a Sadness Call or a Tragedy Call: I'd pick up, and all I'd hear was someone weeping.

And Me too, she heard all around her, intimate not falling away or apart, heard it from other women awakening in the new workshop world...

Above his olive-skinned neck a Low Dark Fade they call it at the barber's school where I go for a $4.99 haircut and an experience.

Nothing is new anymore. We're living in a post-everything society and "art" itself has become satire.

Sometimes she thought there would be peace on earth if we would just learn to breath. All alone we have to invent even that.

The Void is the nothing you may assume about your future.

People, it came to Grace, disappeared into people.

(I'm building backwards naturally.)

Your pain won’t impress anyone. The people your pain does impress aren’t worth impressing.

Did some deaths go on hurting? were there winds below the sea that blew as fast as all other winds but blew through you as you turned end over end slowly enough so if the ledges and cracks down there wanted to move over to make room for you, you'd get in there and go so deep you'd never stop falling.

When two or more survivors, she said, were gathered together, they could breathe their mutual auras in and out to set up flows of rapidly spreading charges that balance out the life of the air and reduce the tension, madness, and violent crime caused like lightening by an imbalance between earth and heaven.

The real question to ask is: Why not simply let women enjoy their fantasies? Why shouldn't a woman entertain the wildest sex her imagination can generate? What damage is done? Who has the right to question it?

What brings me joy is… life. I think you can find joy anywhere, in life. I think it’s a conscious choice. I think you- you choose joy, in life. And no matter how bad things are, no matter how crummy, no matter how dark, because at the end of the day, that’s all you got. It’s looking back on the joy you had, and the joy you found, and the joy you gave other people.

There will come a day when the properties my partner and I own will be sold. But until that day, the cash flow generated from them, and their appreciation in value, ensures that we have the ability to do the things we love today, and in the future.

People in the industry kept telling me intimate and unsolicited details about their sex lives. I realized that pornography was as much an attitude or lifestyle as it was a business. The line between private and public was sometimes blurred to the point of being erased.

Still others observe that women are particularly interested in seeing come-shots because men's ejaculations are generally hidden from them. In "normal" sex, women never see men come. To some of them, it may be as seductively elusive as the glimpse of a breast or lace panties is to a pubescent boy. In this context, the come-shot can be interpreted as almost romantic: The woman wishes to share in her lover's orgasm.

I was angry at them. And I wanted to hurt them. I believed seeing them hurting might free me of my anger, as if justice were some kind of cosmic seesaw in which bringing them down might lift my spirits. This is not justice, however. This is revenge. And there is no end to revenge. That's the point of it.

When someone leaves your life, those exits… are… not made equal. Some are beautiful, and poetic, and satisfying. Others are… abrupt and unfair, but most are just unremarkable, unintentional, clumsy. Where Lup went, she didn’t intend to end up there and she certainly didn't intend to spend as much time away as she did.

By arguing, I mean argumentation rather than a verbal brawl or a meaningless contest in which people one-up each other. An argument is a purposeful exchange with the purpose being to settle or explore an intellectual dispute. The ideal argument is a cooperative venture in which both parties attempt to arrive at the truth. Ideal arguments rarely happen.

It is charged that pornography objectifies women: It converts them into sexual objects. Again, what does this mean? If taken literally, it means nothing at all because objects don't have sexuality; only human beings do. But the charge that pornography portrays women as "sexual beings" would not inspire rage and, so, it has no place in the anti-porn rhetoric.

Just because you love somebody, you don't have to let them hurt you. My motto is -- Love doesn't hurt.

Little G loved stories about all things sacred laced with a bit of irreverence.

Wild Mary reminded me of sweet pea vines tangled under rocks, their true color never taking form.

This I know for sure from my road trip for Jesus: If you're willing to keep your heart open and let the light shine in and out, you'll find love wherever you go.

A supper that says, Remember me, for I will remember you.

This story, with the magic and the fire swords and the crouching woman and the planet-sized ship—it was happening right now.

Life's in parts, and some go together and some don't, and some incongruously don't, and the whole scheme is better left to itself.

Do we not use each other to slip across the frontiers of self-scrutiny as something other than lonely people?

but all I see in the space between the words, / between drops of rain / is how we are both sad / in any language

There is no future. It's sentiment about what might have been.

Sexually correct history considers the graphic depiction of sex to be the traditional and immutable enemy of women's freedom. Exactly the opposite is true.

On a personal level, every women has to discover what she considers to be unacceptable. Each woman has to act as her own censor, her own judge of what is appropriate.

Pornography allows a woman's imagination to run wild. And nothing on earth is more human than wondering "what if.

faith is all we need when reason sends us down a different path.

If you call that music real noise

The void was not just a regular void and empty but was full of all that we did not expect of ourselves.

You find yourself in other people.

And what is your story? someone interrupts. What did you do to end up in this endless community of minds?

It was as if suddenly, looking into the revealed distance, we could think.

Everything got an explanation: the difference is you pick some things to not explain.

He alone can return to Earth to try to do something, only to find that all he can do is try to know what happened.

It is through each other that we can see.

He's seeing things, he's a victim of last night, last year, of what he's read or been told; and he's sick of it. And prefers to just look. Look at one object.

Do you ever feel,' she wonders, 'that we fit into a large life that doesn't know us but--hold us? And that this is better than its being more aware of us?

Truth is just what two people are willing to agree on.

If you can describe something, you must take responsability for it.

Memory kept things from being over.

Isn't there more important things than being brief, Jim?, if you're still there. So brief there is only everything to remember.

I told them a story. It's not my fault they believed it.

Moreover, some of the images covered by the definition go far beyond what can reasonably be considered pornographic. For example, "women's body parts . . . are exhibited such that women are reduced to those parts." This description would include everything from blue jean commercials which zoom in on women's asses to cream ads which show perfectly manicured hands applying the lotion-the sort of advertisements that have appeared in Ms. magazine. Although it is commonplace to criticize such ads for using sex to sell products, it is a real stretch to call them pornographic.

We die a thousand times before the real thing comes along.' 'What does that mean, Daddy?' 'It means little bits of us have to die along the way so the new bits of who we're to become can be born.

This book provides pornography with an ideology. It gives back to women what anti-porn feminism has taken away: the right to pursue their own sexuality without shame or apology, without guilt or censure.

As I’ve said before, “the Mod generation”, contrary to popular belief, was not born in even 1958, but in the 1920s after a steady gestation from about 1917 or so. Now, Mod certainly came of age, fully sure of itself by 1958, completely misunderstood by 1963, and in a perpetual cycle of reinvention and rediscovery of itself by 1967 and 1975, respectively, but it was born in the 1920s, and I will maintain this. I don’t care who disagrees with me, and there are dozens of reasons that I do so —from the Art Deco aesthetic, to flapper fashions (complete with bobbed hair), to androgyny and subtle effeminacy, to jazz.

Let's examine the second accusation first: the idea that pornography is degrading to women. Degrading is a subjective term. Personally, I find detergent commercials in which women become orgasmic over soapsuds to be tremendously degrading to women. I find movies in which prostitutes are treated like ignorant drug addicts to be slander against women. Every woman has the right-the need!-to define degradation for herself.

Blessed with fortune is the only way to describe my life. It’s like a big jigsaw puzzle, and I’m constantly looking for the right pieces to plug into the right spaces. They always seem to be there if I just look hard enough.

Pornography is the explicit artistic depiction of men and/or women as sexual beings.' This is not merely a working definition. It is a definition I propose as a new and neutral starting point for a more fruitful discussion of pornography.

I worry about the younger generation of women who have to go through the same sexual angst that confronts us all. If they turn to feminism, will they find a sense of joy and adventure? Or will they find only anger and a theory of victimization?

What we have in mind for that agency,” McElroy told lawmakers, was an entity that would handle “all satellite and space research and development projects” but also have “a function that extends beyond the immediate foreseeable weapons systems of the current or near future.” McElroy was looking far ahead. America needed an agency that could visualize the nation’s needs before those needs yet existed, he said. An agency that could research and develop “the vast weapons systems of the future.

As recently as the fifties, respectable women were given the sexual choice of marriage or celibacy. Anything else meant ostracism. Women who demanded pleasure in sex were condemned as "nymphomaniacs," much as they are pitied today as "victims of male culture" by anti-porn feminists.

I’ve long believed that the gods give us the music we’re supposed to hear at the times we’re supposed to hear it, because all music, even lyrical and regardless of language performed in, is in and of itself an inherently magical language that can, at proper times, speak to the soul.

I never saw "being different" in and of itself as the point to "being Goth" -- dressing different from most others, maybe, but the point to me was to get together with people who liked the same music and clothes, or at least very similar music and clothes, and go to clubs, go to movies, go to coffee-houses and hold poetry readings and, in general, just have some good harmless fun. Did I look like a dork? Sure, but so did everybody else in the club. We weren't "being different", at least not all of us, we just were different and the point was to stop bitching about being different and just have fun.

Our capacity for love increases with each person we cross paths with throughout our lives, and with each moment we spend with those people. But too often we neglect that part of ourselves in favor of other. And by the time we realize just how important it is, we find ourselves with fewer folks around to practice with. But the seven of you have something that nobody else ever had: time. All the time in the world. Time enough to grow indescribably close. Time enough to learn how to care for each other, how to allow yourselves to be cared for. And in the case of Barry and Lup, time enough to fall deeply and truly in love

... between the Great Swirl and the Two Screen, between the back-and-forth and the endless curve that will come of it--as between the centrifugal coagulation away from a cleared Center, and the penetration from one to another heart, we find a back-and-forth trip of substitutions to collapse our history at a cost anyone must afford.

The current backlash of censorship is an alliance between the Moral Majority (the Right) and the politically correct (the Left). This alliance is threatening the freedom of both women and sexual expression. The Right defines the explicit depiction of sex as evil; the Left defines it as violence against women. The result is the same.

Further, although pornography is predefined as a form of violence against women, several clauses of this definition have nothing to do with such abuse. Instead, they deal with explicit sexual content-e.g. women as sex objects who "invite penetration." This is more of an attack on heterosexual sex than it is on pornography. After all, if there isn't an "invitation to penetration," how can the man know that consent is present?

For over a decade, I have defended the right of women to consume pornography and to be involved in its production. In 1984, when the Los Angeles City Council first debated whether or not to pass an anti-pornography ordinance, I was one of two people -and the only woman-who stood up and went on record against the measure. I argued that the right to work in pornography was a direct extension of the principle "A woman's body, a woman's right.

I’ve enjoyed the comicbook writings of Warren Ellis since a friend introduced me to Transmetropolitan via the “holiday special” in collected volume three. Ah yes, Scott and Edé’s housewarming, I had passed out in a chair, our friend Aeric on the couch, and I woke up to the sound of Edé’s girlfriend coming downstairs and asking Aeric, “what’cha got there?” and Aeric replied, “I’m not sure, but it’s psychotic. Ru, are you up yet? You have to see this when I’m done.” Everyone else should be so lucky to have such an introduction to Ellis.

Yeah, you know… the fact of the matter is, your life is a constant stream of changes, I mean, you start one day accepting a job offer, and you end, saving the world. And you’re going to walk through that door, and your life will never be the same, and I wish I could tell you that everyday from now on will be amazing, and the happiest day of your life, but that’s not the way that life works, but every day will be made better because she’s in it with you. You aren’t going to be alone ever again, even if you’re ever separated, you’ll still never be alone.

I am not saying that you have to be a jazz fan to be a Mod. The Mod scene incorporates a wide variety of music genres, and you don’t have to like all of them to be a Mod. Considering that, you may not have to like every genre generally accepted in the Mod scene, but a basic respect for the genres that helped lay the foundation for the scene (Jazz, Soul, British Rhythm and Blues), especially their place in the scene, is something I feel should be expected of anybody in the Mod scene who wants their opinion taken seriously. That said, let’s be realistic: You may not have to like any one or two or ten specific genres of Mod music, but if you don’t like any of them, yet still fancy yourself to be a “Mod”, don’t be surprised when people in the scene don’t take you seriously at all.

I awake with a start, shaking the cobwebs of sleep from my mind. It’s pitch-dark out, the wind howling. It takes a couple seconds to get my bearings, to realize I’m in my parents’ bed, Ryder beside me, on his side, facing me. Our hands are still joined, though our fingers are slack now. “Hey, you,” he says sleepily. “That one was loud, huh?” “What was?” “Thunder. Rattled the windows pretty bad.” “What time is it?” “Middle of the night, I’d say.” I could check my phone, but that would require sitting up and letting go of his hand. Right now, I don’t want to do that. I’m too comfortable. “Have you gotten any sleep at all?” I ask him, my mouth dry and cottony. “I think I drifted off for a little bit. Till…you know…the thunder started up again.” “Oh. Sorry.” “It should calm down some when the eye moves through.” “If there’s still an eye by the time it gets here. The center of circulation usually starts breaking up once it goes inland.” Yeah, all those hours watching the Weather Channel occasionally come in handy. He gives my hand a gentle squeeze. “Wow, maybe you should consider studying meteorology. You know, if the whole film-school thing doesn’t work out for you.” “I could double major,” I shoot back. “I bet you could.” “What are you going to study?” I ask, curious now. “I mean, besides football. You’ve got to major in something, don’t you?” He doesn’t answer right away. I wonder what’s going through his head--why he’s hesitating. “Astrophysics,” he says at last. “Yeah, right.” I roll my eyes. “Fine, if you don’t want to tell me…” “I’m serious. Astrophysics for undergrad. And then maybe…astronomy.” “What, you mean in graduate school?” He just nods. “You’re serious? You’re going to major in something that tough? I mean, most football players major in something like phys ed or underwater basket weaving, don’t they?” “Greg McElroy majored in business marketing,” he says with a shrug, ignoring my jab. “Yeah, but…astrophysics? What’s the point, if you’re just going to play pro football after you graduate anyway?” “Who says I want to play pro football?” he asks, releasing my hand. “Are you kidding me?” I sit up, staring at him in disbelief. He’s the best quarterback in the state of Mississippi. I mean, football is what he does…It’s his life. Why wouldn’t he play pro ball? He rolls over onto his back, staring at the ceiling, his arms folded behind his head. “Right, I’m just some dumb jock.” “Oh, please. Everyone knows you’re the smartest kid in our class. You always have been. I’d give anything for it to come as easily to me as it does to you.” He sits up abruptly, facing me. “You think it’s easy for me? I work my ass off. You have no idea what I’m working toward. Or what I’m up against,” he adds, shaking his head. “Probably not,” I concede. “Anyway, if anyone can major in astrophysics and play SEC ball at the same time, you can. But you might want to lose the attitude.” He drops his head into his hands. “I’m sorry, Jem. It’s just…everyone has all these expectations. My parents, the football coach--” “You think I don’t get that? Trust me. I get it better than just about anyone.” He lets out a sigh. “I guess our families have pretty much planned out our lives for us, haven’t they?” “They think they have, that’s for sure,” I say.