82 Quotes by Joshua Ferris

We had visceral, rich memories of dull, interminable hours. Then a day would pass in perfect harmony with our projects, our family members, and our coworkers, and we couldn’t believe we were getting paid for this.

She no longer lived in a world of speculation or recall and would take nothing on faith when the facts were but a few clicks away. It drove me nuts. I was sick to death of having as my dinner companions Wikipedia, About.com, IMDb, the Zagat guide, Time out New York, a hundred Tumblrs, the New York Times, and People magazine. Was there not some strange forgotten pleasure in reveling in our ignorance? Would we just be wrong?

People have all this resentment against their parents for fucking them up, but they never realize, the minute they have a kid, that they cease being the child so fondly victimized in their hearts and start being the benighted perpetrators of unfathomable pain.

It is really irritating to work with irritating people

Some people would never forget certain people, a few people would remember everyone, and most of us would mostly be forgotten.

If in large part we were concerned only with making it through another day without getting laid off, there was a smaller part just hoping to leave for the night without contributing to someone’s lifetime of hurt.

He kept his head down and slowly worked himself, word by word, back into communion with the other hours, days, years - there was in fact no name for this particular unit of time - that together formed a continuum of unawareness that was as close to transcendence ash e would come. He was working himself, as if with a spade in a tunnel that finally yields to light, out of the physical world.

What separated the living from one another could be as impenetrable as whatever barrier separated the living from the dead.

They were like two inviolable spheres touching at a fine point in their curves, touching but failing to penetrate, failing to breathe the other's air.