Sam Rennie

The sweet habit of each other had begun to put lines around her mouth, lines that looked like quotation marks - as if everything she said had been said before.

It was a mistake to believe that other people were not living as deeply as you were. Besides, you were not even living that deeply.

Sometimes it really does feel like a curse, the meaning I can attach to anything.

One piece of knowledge I don't have: how to square my own gratitude for life with behaviour that suggests an indifference to it.

Sadness and joy aren't opposites of each other. They are each the opposite of indifference.

It is we who are passing when we say time passes.

My # 1 fear is the acceleration of days.

Imagining the future is a kind of nostalgia.

When we are young, we think ourselves the first to have each feeling in the world.

What I didn’t realize was that wanting to test desire is nothing more than a ruse to get what we want without admitting that we want it.

They say nothing lasts forever but they're just scared it will last longer than they can love it.

I'm sorry I keep saying, How are you? when I really mean, Are you happy?

I miss you more than I remember you.

But depression wasn't the word. This was a plunge encompassing sorrow and revulsion far beyond the personal: a sick, drenching nausea at all humanity and human endeavor from the dawn of time. The writhing loathsomeness of the biological order. Old age, sickness, death. No escape for anyone. Even the beautiful ones were like soft fruit about to spoil. And yet somehow people still kept fucking and breeding and popping out new fodder for the grave, producing more and more new beings to suffer like this was some kind of redemptive, or good, or even somehow morally admirable thing: dragging more innocent creatures into the lose-lose game. Squirming babies and plodding, complacent, hormone-drugged moms. Oh, isn't he cute? Awww. Kids shouting and skidding in the playground with no idea what future Hells await them: boring jobs and ruinous mortgages and bad marriages and hair loss and hip replacements and lonely cups of coffee in an empty house and a colostomy bag at the hospital. Most people seemed satisfied with the thin decorative glaze and the artful stage lighting that sometimes, made the bedrock atrocity of the human predicament look somewhat more mysterious or less abhorrent. People gambled and golfed and planted gardens and traded stocks and had sex and bought new cars and practiced yoga and worked and prayed and redecorated their homes and got worked up over the news and fussed over their children and gossiped about their neighbors and pored over restaurant reviews and founded charitable organizations and supported political candidates and attended the U.S. Open and dined and travelled and distracted themselves with all kinds of gadgets and devices, flooding themselves incessantly with information and texts and communication and entertainment from every direction to try to make themselves forget it: where we were, what we were. But in a strong light there was no good spin you could put on it. It was rotten from top to bottom.

You underestimate your own power so you don't have to blame yourself for treating other people badly.

If people appeared to behave pointlessly in grief, it was only because human life was pointless, and this was the truth that grief revealed.

You know, either everyone feels like this a little bit, and they're just not talking about it, or I'm completely fucking alone.