Mcinerney Quotes

The capacity for friendship is God's way of apologizing for our families.

Sometimes I think the difference between what we want and what we're afraid of is about the width of an eyelash.

Everything becomes symbol and irony when you've been betrayed

Your heartbreak is just another version of the same old story.

It's like, you can't trust anybody, and if somebody you know doesn't fuck you over it's just because the price of selling you down the river was never high enough.

You have friends who actually care about you and speak the language of the inner self. You have avoided them of late. Your soul is as disheveled as your apartment, and until you can clean it up a little you don't want to invite anyone inside.

Something changed. Somewhere along the line you stopped accelerating.

Things happen, people change,' is what Amanda said. For her that covered it. You wanted an explanation, and ending that would assign blame and dish up justice. You considered violence and you considered reconciliation . But what you are left with is a premonition of the way your life will fade behind you, like a book you have read too quickly, leaving a dwindling trail of images and emotions, until all you can remember is a name.

I'd like to have the kind of house someday where a carousel horse wouldn't be out of place in the living room.

There is a shabby nobility in failing all by yourself.

Great minds sink alike, right?

You keep thinking that with practice you will eventually get the knack of enjoying superficial encounters, that you will stop looking for the universal solvent, stop grieving. You will learn to compound happiness out of small increments of mindless pleasure.

The problem is, for some reason you think you are going to meet the kind of girl who is not the kind of girl who would be at a place like this at this time of the morning.

You are a republic of voices tonight. Unfortunately, that republic is Italy.

Taste ... is a matter of taste (Tad Allagash)

Your presence here is is only a matter of conducting an experiment in limits, reminding yourself of what you aren’t.

Tad's mission in life is to have more fun than anyone else in New York City, and this involves a lot of moving around, since there is always the likelihood that where you aren't is more fun than where you are.

You feel that if only you could make yourself sit down at a typewriter you could give shape to what seems merely a chain reaction of pointless disasters.

She said that certain facts are accessible only from one point of view – the point of view of the creature who experiences them. You think she meant that the only shoes we can ever wear are our own. Meg can’t imagine what it’s like for you to be you, she can only imagine herself being you

She had a face like a slapped arse and an arse like a bag of Doritos

Here you are again. All messed up and no place to go.

Everything becomes symbol and irony when you have been betrayed.

The Church creates its sinners so it has something to save.

But what you are left with is a premonition of the way your life will fade behind you, like a book you have read too quickly, leaving a dwindling trail of images and emotions, until all you can remember is a name.

Bottles of wine aren't like paintings. At some point you have to consume them. The object in life is to die with no bottles of wine in your cellar. To drink your last bottle of wine and go to sleep that night and not wake up.

Eventually you ascend the stairs to the street. You think of Plato's pilgrims climbing out of the cave, from the shadow world of appearances toward things as they really are, and you wonder if it is possible to change in this life. Being with a philosopher makes you think.

You never stopped thinking of yourself as a writer biding his time in the Department of Factual Verification. But between the job and the life there wasn't much time left over for emotion recollected in tranquillity.

a pockmarked boy with a scraggy ponytail and four tiny rings in his right ear leaned against the wall of the armory, holding his dog on a leash, a sign hanging from his neck: PLEASE FEEL FREE TO PET MY DOG. IT MAY MAKE YOU FEEL BETTER.

I'd urge you to try German Riesling because it's delicious, but I fear you'll be more impressed if I tell you it's cutting-edge. That, after all, is what we want to know-- what's now and happening. (Do you really think clunky square-toed shoes make your feet look better than those with slimming, tapered toes? You just wear them because that's what fashion dictates, you slut.)

Did you know that ninety percent of your average household dust is composed of human epidermal matter? That's skin, to you." Perhaps this explains your sense of Amanda's omnipresence. She has left her skin behind.

So many other boys and girls grew up with holes in their chests gaping as wide as the Christian fissure that had spat them into the world.

Memories lurk like dustballs in the backs of drawers. The stereo is a special model that plays only music fraught with poignant associations.

You are the kind of guy who always hopes for a miracle at the last minute.

Suffering is supposed to be the raw stuff of art.

You either need to accept the past as the building blocks that brought you right up to today, or you need to be a better liar.

You are the stuff of which consumer profiles – American Dream: Educated Middle-Class Model – are made. When you're staying at the Plaza with your beautiful wife, doesn't it make sense to order the best Scotch that money can buy before you go to the theater in your private limousine?

Taste is a matter of taste.

The candor was infectious. It spread back to the beginning of your life. You tried to tell her, as well as you could, what it was like being you. You described the feeling you’d always had of being misplaced, of always standing to one side of yourself, of watching yourself in the world even as you were being in the world, and wondering if this was how everyone felt. That you always believed that other people had a clearer idea of what they were doing, and didn’t worry quite so much about why.

The intercom buzzes while you're changing your shirt. You push the Talk button: "Who is it?" "Narcotics squad. We're soliciting donations for children all over the world who have no drugs.

The night has already turned on that imperceptible pivot where two A.M. changes to six A.M. You know this moment has come and gone, but you are not yet willing to concede that you have crossed the line beyond which all is gratuitous damage and the palsy of unraveled nerve endings. Somewhere back there you could have cut your losses, but your rode past that moment on a comet trail of white powder and now you are trying to hang on to the rush.

The girl with the shaved head has a scar tattooed on her scalp. It looks like a long, sutured gash. You tell her it is very realistic. She takes this as a compliment and thanks you. You meant as opposed to romantic. “I could use one of those right over my heart,” you say.

Sometimes you feel like the only man in the city without group affiliation.

The level of the room keeps changing. All of the surfaces swell and recede with oceanic rhytm. You are not quite all right. You are somewhat wrong.

You will have to go slowly. You will have to learn everything all over again.

Love is recreational, it needs not be aspirational

Growing up meant admitting you couldn’t have everything.

There she is, as eligible a candidate as you’re likely to find this late in the game. The sexual equivalent of fast food.

Here's my soul, why don't you shit on it?

Go Home. Cut your losses. Stay. Go for it. You are a republic of voices tonight. Unfortunately, that republic is Italy. All these voices waving their arms and screaming at one another.

That's the motive. Saving my soul. And let them think they're saving my soul, because in doing that they're saving me from being abused by bastards who think they have a right to rape me.

You described the feeling you’d always had of being misplaced, of always standing to one side of yourself, of watching yourself in the world even as you were being in the world, and wondering if this was how everyone felt. That you always believed that other people had a clearer idea of what they were doing, and didn’t worry quite so much about why.

Your brain at this moment is composed of brigades of tiny Bolivian soldiers. They are tired and muddy from their long march through the night. There are holes in their boots and they are hungry. They need to be fed. The need the Bolivian Marching Powder.

She just waited. Rosie had no choice. She’d have to do it on her own. She’d do anything for Amy, even hear whatever she was about to hear, on her own. The consultant was in his office. It was as untidy as always. He didn’t smile. It wasn’t a bad sign. He

Parents sat gloomy and still, like rows of turnips in a grocer's box. Their little criminals sat with them, tapping LOLs on their phones, or milled in the yard outside stinking of Lynx and taut nonchalance. Solicitors strode in and out in a twist of slacks and briefcases.

She said that certain facts are accessible only from one point of view--the point of view of the creature who experiences them. You think she meant that the only shoes we can ever wear are our own. Meg can’t imagine what it’s like for you to be you, she can only imagine herself being you.

Last night Vicky was talking about the ineffability of inner experience. She told you to imagine what it was like to be a bat. Even if you knew what sonar was and how it worked, you could never know what it feels like to have it, or what it feels like to be a small, furry creature hanging upside down from the roof of a cave. She said that certain facts are accessible only from one point of view - the point of view of the creature who experiences them. You think she meant that the only shoes we can ever wear are our own. Meg can't imagine what it's like for you to be you, she can only imagine herself being you.

Tad’s mission in life is to have more fun than anyone else in New York City, and this involves a lot of moving around, since there is always the likelihood that where you aren’t is more fun than where you are. You are awed by his strict refusal to acknowledge any goal higher than the pursuit of pleasure. You want to be like that. You also think he is shallow and dangerous. His friends are all rich and spoiled, like the cousin from Memphis you met earlier in the evening who would not accompany you below Fourteenth Street because, he said, he didn’t have a lowlife visa. This cousin has a girlfriend with cheekbones to break your heart, and you knew she was the real thing when she steadfastly refused to acknowledge your presence. She possessed secrets—about islands, about horses, about French pronunciation—that you would never know.

This is shaping up even worse than you anticipated. Still, you feel a measure of detachment, as if you had suffered everything already and this were just a flashback. You wish that you had paid more attention when a woman you met at Heartbreak told you about Zen meditation. Think of all of this as an illusion. She can't hurt you. Nothing can hurt the samurai wh enters combat fully resolved to die. You have already accepted the inevitability of termination, as they say. Still, you'd rather not have to sit through this.

I’m about to take a shower because I smell like an all-nighter, then I think I’ll take a bath so I can have a faucet orgasm. After all, I didn’t get any last night. A faucet orgasm is pretty much the same principle as a bidet orgasm except upside-down. When we were growing up we had bidets in all the bathrooms and when I was about ten I accidentally discovered one of the things they were good for. After that I used to spend hours on the damn thing. This dump we rent doesn’t have a bidet so I have to get in the tub and slide up toward the front, running my legs up the wall on either side of the faucet. Turn on the warm water and smile. Actually, you’ve got to get the water temperature just right first or you could really be in for a nasty shock. I’ve made that mistake a few times. This time I get it just right and I come three times before I get around to actually taking a bath.

You told me half a story. Why won't you tell me the rest of it? Coz you're dangerous enough with half a story, aren't you?

Their notion of bringing the world together under the Jesus banner hinted now at effort without recompense, and they hated it.

Below him, his city spread in soft mounds and hollows, like a duvet dropped into a well. The breeze and the elevation made

The clergy were self-professed experts in bestowing grace on behalf of the absentee landlord.

There were people dying, too. That's the way of the city: one new man to take the place of another, bleeding out on a polished kitchen floor.

Oh my God. A dealer's telling me to stop doing drugs. Dealing doesn't automatically make someone a cunt. Unlike whoring.

men talk to women so they can sleep with them and women sleep with men so they can talk to them." "Where does that leave us," she asked lightly. "In a Zen garden. Green and yellow mosses, raked gravel. Silence.

It's a funny thing that the ritual is more powerful than the killing. What's tied to the earth is less important than what's tied to the heavens. You're crosser about my language in the confessional than you are about the fact that I killed a man.

Then all the lights go out. As we follow him through the course of a frenzied week, we discover that beyond the frolic and wondrous prospects this young man has, essentially, nothing. The question is, which is worse: living an illusion, or losing it?

His being too enveloped in opaque promise, choking the faculty with it. Eyes streaming and throats constricted with the noxious concentrate of Cork's great post-millennial of hope. Oh God, that was it. Ryan was all tied up in nasty knots of his own smothering competence.

You had to get off on it. They all got off on it. That's why your shelves were full of Call of Duty games and box sets of The Sopranos. That's why you could crowd around picking out your favourite bits from Family Guy, because you hadn't been fucked irrevocably by shit that isn't even supposed to upset you.

From the window, Luke looked out over the water towers of Fifth Avenue to the park, studying the senescence of the daylight, which seemed almost viscous, ready to coagulate—trying to register that perfect moment of transition from day to evening, that instant when the light, in dying, was most nearly itself.

The sound of the tumblers in the locks of your apartment door puts you in mind of dungeons. The place is haunted. Just this morning you found a makeup brush beside the toilet. Memories lurk like dustballs at the backs of drawers. The stereo is a special model that plays only music fraught with poignant associations.

WHO IS- OR WAS- YOUR FAVORITE WRITER? For style and consistency, I would have to say John Updike. No one else in the world writes the way that he does, and very few have enjoyed the longevity of career or employed the breadth of scope that he has. Mailer’s a close second, but they are completely different animals. Bret Easton Ellis, whom I unintentionally left off of my answer to the previous question, is good as well- he creates a goodly number of inimitable situations, and his dexterity of language produces many, many killer lines- lines that belong in any literate person’s lexicon. I would say the same for Jay McInerney as well. But Easton’s output is spotty: every other book is crap. He did Less Than Zero, and that was fucking amazing, and then he did The Rules Of Attraction. After that, he wrote American Psycho- a brilliant but sadly misunderstood book at the time- but the follow-up, Glamorama, sucked horribly. At least, in my humble opinion. After that, I kind of lost interest. If you occasionally throw off a collection of shitty writing, it does affect your credibility when you seek to speak with your constituency about matters of life and death. Fiction is a deadly serious business, and if you’re dry and out of ideas, then just fucking say so and keep working at it until you’re finally writing something that it would be a crime not to let other people read.

He looks out the window at the falling snow, then turns and takes his wife in his arms, feeling grateful to be here even as he wonders what he is going to do with his life in strictly practical terms. For years he had trained himself to do one thing, and he did it well, but he doesn't know whether he wants to keep doing it for the rest of his life, for that matter, whether anyone will let him. He is still worrying when they go to bed. Feeling his wife's head nesting in the pillow below his shoulder, he is almost certain that they will find ways to manage. They've been learning to get by with less, and they'll keep learning. It seems to him as if they're taking a course in loss lately. And as he feels himself falling asleep he has an insight he believes is important, which he hopes he will remember in the morning, although it is one of those thoughts that seldom survive translation to the language of daylight hours: knowing that whatever plenty befalls them together or separately in the future, they will become more and more intimate with loss as the years accumulate, friends dying or slipping away undramatically into the crowded past, memory itself finally flickering and growing treacherous toward the end; knowing that even the children who may be in their future will eventually school them in the pain of growth and separation, as their own parents and mentors die off and leave them alone in the world, shivering at the dark threshold.

She's on her knees for a higher power. The Church craves power above all things, power above all of the living. The Church has an ideal and it'll raze all in its way to achieve it. The Church needs its blind devout. Your mother my mother, the people in there plumping Father Fiddler's ego, they're all for it. They've been given a class and they're clutching it. The Church creates its sinners so it has something to save. Your mother's a Magdalene for her Christ

Times were tough and the people were harsh and the clergy were cruel-cruel, and you know it! The most natural thing in the world is giving birth; you built your whole religion around it. And yet you poured pitch onto girls like me and sold us into slavery and took our humanity away from us twice, a third time, as often as you could. I was lucky, Father. I was only sent away. A decade earlier and where would I have been? I might have died in your asylums, me with the smart mouth. I killed one man but you would have killed me in the name of your god, wouldn't you? How many did you kill? How many lives did you destroy with your morality and your Seal of Confession and your lies? Now. For the absolution. Once God knows you're sorry he lets you off the hook, isn't that right? Me? Oh, Father. I know I'm sorry. What about you? Bless me Ireland for I have sinned. Go on, boy. No wonder you say infinitely God is brimming with the clemency, for how else would any of you bastards sleep at night?

Your head is pounding with voices of confession and revelation. You followed the rails of white powder across the mirror in pursuit of a point of convergence where everything was cross-referenced according to a master code. For a second, you felt terrific. You were coming to grips. Then the coke ran out; as you hoovered the last line, you saw yourself hideously close-up with a rolled twenty sticking out of your nose. The goal is receding. Whatever it was. You can't get everything straight in one night.

At the subway station you wait fifteen minutes on the platform for a train. Finally a local, enervated by graffiti, shuffles into the station. You get a seat and hoist a copy of the New York Post. The Post is the most shameful of your several addictions. You hate to support this kind of trash with your thirty cents, but you are a secret fan of Killer Bees, Hero Cops, Sex Fiends, Lottery Winners, Teenage Terrorists, Liz Taylor, Tough Tots, Sicko Creeps, Living Nightmares, Life on Other Planets, Spontaneous Human Combustion, Miracle Diets and Coma Babies.

Such moments are too often lost, the private interludes between the tribal gatherings, the transit between destinations, when the city becomes an intimate landscape, a secret shared by two. This was once their neighborhood and she wants to reclaim it for a little while, to walk past the apartment where they spent so much of their lives, even if it makes her sad thinking of all that transpired there, and all that’s lost. It makes her melancholy to imagine that she might never be here again, that these blocks, their former haunts, and their old building will outlast them; that the city is supremely indifferent to their transit through its arteries, and to their ultimate destination. For now, she wants just to be in between. She knows that later it won’t be the party she will remember so much as this, the walk with her husband in the crisp autumn air, bathed in the yellow metropolitan light spilling from thousands of windows, this suspended moment of anticipation before arrival.

esas ocasiones: entró en casa y llamó

A fejükben ez jár: Velem is megtörténhet?, és te szeretnéd megnyugtatni őket, hogy ez csakis a te hibád. Próbálják magukat a bőrödbe képzelni, csakhogy ez fogós feladat. Tegnap este Vicky a belső élmény megoszthatatlanságáról beszélt. Képzeld el, milyen lehet denevérnek lenni, mondta. Még ha tudod is, mi az a radar és hogyan működik, akkor sem tudhatod meg soha, milyen érzés radarral látni vagy kicsi, szőrös lényként fejjel lefelé lógni egy barlang tetejéről. Bizonyos tények, magyarázta, csakis egy nézőpontból közelíthetők meg: annak a lénynek a szemszögéből, aki megéli őket. Vagyis az ember nem bújhat be másnak a bőrébe. Meg nem képzelheti el, milyen neked önmagadnak lenni, ő csak ő magát tudja a helyedbe képzelni.

He belonged to the new breed of male epicureans who viewed cooking as a competitive sport, and pursued it with the same avidity that others had for fly-fishing or golf, with the attendant fetishization of the associated gadgetry and equipment. He

they’d followed their best instincts and based their lives on the premise that money couldn’t buy happiness, learning only gradually the many varieties of unhappiness it might have staved off. Russell

It's the Abstract Expressionist approach to publishing. Throw ink at paper. Hope for pattern to emerge.

Under the spell of alcohol your differences recede.

Tears come to your eyes, and you feel such a rush of tenderness and pity that you stop beside a lamppost and hang on for support.

You have always wanted to be a writer. Getting the job at the magazine was only your first step toward literacy celebrity. You used to write what you believed to be urbane sketches infinitely superior to those appearing in the magazine every week. You sent them up to Fiction; they came back with polite notes. "Not quite right for us now, but thanks for letting us see this." You would try to interpret the notes: what about the word now-do they mean that you should submit this again, later? It wasn't the notes so much as the effort of writing that discouraged you.

For a few weeks you got up at six to compose short stories at the kitchen table with while Amanda slept in the other room. Then your night life started getting more interesting and complicated, and climbing out of bed became harder and harder. You were gathering experience for a novel. You went to parties with writers, cultivated a writerly persona. You wanted to be Dylan Thomas without the paunch. F. Scott Fitzgerald without the crack-up. You wanted to skip over the dull grind of actual creation.

You just collect bulky religious souvenirs to use as murder weapons, is it? No one ever suspects the heavy hand of the Lord. Repent, repent, or Jesus might take the head off yeh!

El marco en torno al cual construimos nuestras vidas es frágil, y en una ciudad de seres interconectados una sola viga rota puede hacer peligrar los picos y las sombras de la línea del horizonte. Robbie O'Donovan murió mientras iba a la caza de algún sentimiento que llevarle a casa a una chica a la que se había negado a salvar, y al fallecer, convirtió en mierda estructuras que nunca había visto. Pequeñas casas. Pequeños refugios. Pequeñas vidas. La ciudad funciona a nivel macro, y ¿qué significa eso sino las agonías y los éxtasis vivos, palpitantes y sudorosos de cien mil pequeñas vidas? La ciudad de Cork no va a fijarse en los últimos pasos vacilantes de un hombrecillo perdido. Todas esas vidas, todas esas vigas entrecruzándose en el seno de la más magnífica de las estructuras..., la ciudad no verá los palos partidos ni percibirá las primeras chispas.

Mert tényleg, valahogy olyan durvának érzem, ha az ember nem nyeli le. Mint amikor meghívsz valakit a házadba vacsorára, és aztán a konyhában kell ennie a cselédekkel.

Sometimes you feel like the only man in the city without a group affiliation.

You described the feeling you'd always had of being misplaced, of always standing to one side of yourself, of watching yourself in the world as even you were being in the world, and wondering if this was how everyone felt. That you always believed that other people had a clearer idea of what they were doing, and didn't quite worry so much about why.

a girlfriend with cheekbones to break your heart, and you knew she was the real thing when she steadfastly refused to acknowledge your presence.

Weren't you suspicious when you saw the sign on her forehead? Which sign was that? The one that says "Space to Let. Long and Short Term Leasing." We met in a bar. It was too dark to read

During your childhood, as you grew up, the suspicion grew stronger in you that everyone else was initiated into some fundamental secret that remained closed to you. The others all knew what they were doing...Not until you reached college, where everyone started fresh, did you begin to pick up the tricks of winning friends and influencing people. Although you became adept, you also felt that you were exercising an acquired skill, something that came naturally to others, you succeeded in faking everyone out, and never quite lost the fear that you would eventually be discovered a fraud, an impostor in the social circle.

And as he feels himself falling asleep he has an insight he believes is important, which he hopes he will remember in the morning, although it is one of those thoughts that seldom survive translation to the language of daylight hours

The bald girl i emblematic of the problem. The problem is, for some reason you think you are going to meet the kind of girl who is not the kind of girl who would be at a place like this at this time of the morning. When you meet her you are going to tell her that what you really want is a house in the country with a a garden. New York, the club scene, bald women - you're tired of all that. Your presence here is only a matter of conducting an experiment in limits, reminding yourself of what you aren't.

The bald girl is emblematic of the problem. The problem is, for some reason you think you are going to meet the kind of girl who is not the kind of girl who would be at a place like this at this time of the morning. When you meet her you are going to tell her that what you really want is a house in the country with a a garden. New York, the club scene, bald women - you're tired of all that. Your presence here is only a matter of conducting an experiment in limits, reminding yourself of what you aren't.

Just outside the door you spot her: tall, dark and alone, half hidden behind a pillar on the edge of the dance floor. You approach laterally, moving your stuff like a Bad Spade through the slalom of a synthesized conga rhytm. She jumps when you touch her shoulder. "Dance?" She looks at you as if you had just suggested instrumental rape. "I do not speak English," she says, when you ask again. "Français?" She shakes her head. Why is she looking at you that way, as if tarantulas were nesting in your eye sockets?