238 Quotes by Rachel Kushner

All you can do is involve yourself totally in your own life, your own moment, Lonzi said. And when we feel pessimism crouching on our shoulders like a stinking vulture, he said, we banish it, we smother it with optimism. We want, and our want kills doom.

We were in separate realities, fast and slow. There is no fixed reality, only objects in contrast.

Silent people can be misleading, suggesting profundity and thoughtfulness where there may be none.

If there was no imperative, it was not love.

Lovers offered only what they offered and nothing more, and what they offered came with provisos.

...it is easier to like difficult people when they are leaving, or already gone.

...America was supposed to be a place ruined and homogenized by highways, that that was its unique character, crass and vulgar sameness.

There's an innocent displacement, a dreaming, and idols are perfect for a little girl's dreaming. They aren't real. They aren't the gas station attendant trying to lure you into the back of the service station, a paperboy trying to lure you into a toolshed, a friend's father trying to lure you into his car. They don't lure. They beckon, but like desert mirages.

A funny thing about women and machines: the combination made men curious. They seemed to think it had something to do with them.