14 Quotes by Brandon Taylor

The truly awful thing about beauty is that it reminds us of our limits. Beauty is a kind of unrelenting cruelty. It takes truth, hones it to a terrifying keenness, and uses it to slice us to the bone.

Memory sifts. Memory lifts. Memory makes due with what it is given. Memory is not about facts. Memory is an inconsistent measurement of the pain in one’s life.

,I didn’t know much about God and the devil except what you shouldn’t do to invite one or the other, but I knew that I wanted to be full of one, and if it couldn’t be the one I wanted, then I would take the other. That if God wanted nothing to do with me, then I’d take the devil. I’d take him on my knees where I’d taken the men, let him pull me down in a bed of kudzu and fuck me, so long as I wasn’t empty anymore.

It's... mostly fine," Wallace admits, getting too close to the bone. He doesn't want to go back over the thing about how grief can feel diffuse and dense all at once, like a flock of birds in the sky. He doesn't want to get into it. He can taste dirt on his lips and in his mouth, granular and salty.

It is why he does not trust memory. Memory sifts. Memory lifts. Memory makes due with what it is given. Memory is not about facts. Memory is an inconsistent measurement of the pain in one’s life. (From Real Life.)

The most unfair part of it, Wallace thinks, is that when you tell white people that something is racist, they hold it up to the light and try to discern if you are telling the truth as if they can tell by the grain if something is racist or not, and they always trust their own judgment. It's unfair because white people have a vested interest in undermining racism, it's amount, it's intensity, it's shape, its effects. They are the fox in the henhouse.

Miller: "You are so determined to be unknowable." Wallace: "We are always unknowable.

If it's in a winning game, we all look good.

There will always be enough carries for everybody,