116 Quotes by Steve Toltz

About pain and suffering – he thought that you can bear it all. It’s only the fear of pain and suffering that is unbearable.

Conservatism is like plaque; even once scraped away, it builds up again to problematic levels, so that what is now permissible can yet again become taboo -.

I learned that detaching is easy. Retreat? Easy. Hiding? Dissolving? Extraction? Simple. When you withdraw from the world, the world withdraws too, in equal measure.

Does anyone go to the grave satisfied? True satisfaction can’t exist as long as there’s one itch left to scratch. And I don’t care who you are, there’s always an itch.

We know what country this is: It’s the stupid place where twenty-plus million people boast about being ordinary.

There’s freedom in looking crazy.

I concluded that my father had tried to erase any image of his brother so he might forget him. The futility of the attempt was obvious; when you put in that much effort to forget someone, the effort itself becomes a memory. Then you have to forget the forgetting, and that too is memorable.

I had begun to perceive my genitals as imaginary beasts in some epic fourteenth-century Scottish poem.

I couldn’t help but be impressed. If you knew how hard these bastards worked, you’d never say anything negative about privilege again, and you wouldn’t even want it for yourself.