#self.identity

“‘More and more we will discover our own truths and our own way of speaking, and this new voice will be uncluttered by old histories, old mores, old dead and useless dreams…’

”Thump, thump, thump…“ (109)

“The problem was you had to keep choosing between one evil or another, no matter what you chose, they sliced a bit more off you, until there was nothing left. The age of 25 most people were finished. A whole god-damned nation of assholes driving automobiles, eating, having babies, doing everything in the worst possible way, like voting for the presidential candidate who reminded them most of themselves.” (174)

“He couldn’t keep his pecker-mind off of snatch-thoughts.” (181)

“The band began to play again and the boys and girls began to dance again and the lights revolved overhead throwing shades of gold, then red, then blue, then green, and gold again on the couples. As I watched them I said to myself, someday my dance will begin. When that day comes I will have something that they don’t have.” (194)

“There is no discipline of forgetting; we are at the mercy of random natural processes, like stroke and amnesia, and such self-interventions as drugs, alcohol, or suicide. Abu, however, can perform on himself precise local suicides, temporary amnesias, painless aphasias.” (26)

“As our lives tick on, gradually robbing the future of potential and robbing the past of relevance, we trudge along the arrow of time dragging with us this elusive curiosity we call a self — an ever-shifting packet of personal identity, mystifying in how it links us to our childhood selves and misleading in how it maps out our future selves.”

"Such moments were...impossible to represent precisely because they were ready-made literature, because the ease with which they could be represented entered and cancelled the experience: where life was supposed to be its most immediate, when the present managed to differentiate itself with violence, life was at its most generic, following the rules of Aristotle, and one did not make contact with the real, but performed such contact for an imagined audience." — p64

“Who wasn’t squatting in one of the handful of prefabricated subject positions proffered by capital or whatever you wanted to call it, lying every time she said “I”; who wasn’t a bit player in a looped infomercial for the damaged life? If I was a poet, I had become one because poetry, more intensely than any other practice, could not evade its anachronism and marginality and so constituted a kind of acknowledgment of my own preposterousness, admitting my bad faith in good faith, so to speak.” – p.101