"The Mysteries of Pittsburgh" Quotes

Love is never any better than the lover.

The pure present is an ungraspable advance of the past devouring the future. In truth, all sensation is already memory.

How strange it is. We have these deep terrible lingering fears about ourselves and the people we love. Yet we walk around, talk to people, eat and drink. We manage to function. The feelings are deep and real. Shouldn't they paralyze us? How is it we can survive them, at least for a little while?

I wondered if I would ever be able to tell the stories of these boys without invoking their fathers, without making them seem like children, or worse, like me.

What you've got are some big questions and a handful of answers that you don't like. You see two or three things about yourself that you don't like and you start thinking that maybe there's something else to blame. Your father. Your upbringing. Your sexuality.

I was beginning to understand that so much of adulthood was learning to expect nothing of others.

We were so beautiful, he thought. We were so doomed.

I realized that I was no longer driving the car consciously. I was driving it by a kind of instinct, only I was in a different dimension.

The only thing that mattered was what was happening now, right this second, the present moment.

It seemed that the only lover available to me was solitude.