62 Quotes by Peter Cameron

She had all the best things wrong with her – incest, insanity, drug addiction, bulimia, alopecia: you name it. All the perfect stuff for a memoir. She’s so lucky.

I knew my mother was right, but that didn’t change the way I felt about things. People always think that if they can prove they’re right, you’ll change your mind.

What if she was meant to be, or could have been, someone important in my life? I think that’s what scares me: the randomness of everything. That the people who could be important to you might just pass you by. Or you pass them by.

I don’t think I could ever work in such a blatantly hierarchical corporate setting. I know that everyone in this world is not equal, but I can’t bear environments that make this truth so obvious.

It is a shame that we so quickly lose that ability to believe in things; it limits the opportunities we have to transform ourselves, to save ourselves, for it puts the awful burden of transforming and saving ourselves on ourselves. Once you stop believing, you cannot pray, or make sacrifices or pilgrimages, or light candles. You are stuck with yourself, in a world without miracles.

It is enough to remember the fact of the happiness.

I don’t know why I felt so closed and bitter and threatened by the things I did not like.

American men are so embarrassed about napping,” she said. “They think it is some sort of feminine indulgence. I detest a man who can’t nap.

And the boys were all clean, their faces freshly and brutally shaved, their hair painstakingly gelled into exquisite apparent carelessness, with this electric feeling inside of them, which matched the feelings in the girls, that they were all ascending, moving into a future that could only improve them, and I wondered what it was like – the miracle, the stupidity of feeling that.