Survivor: A Novel

Evil flowed through electric wires to make people lazy.

The shortest distance between two points is a time line, a schedule, a map of your time, the itinerary for the rest of your life. Nothing shows you the straight line from here to death like a list.

I want to think the world is getting better and better, but really I know it's not. You want there to be some improvement in people, but there won't be. And you want to think there's something you can get done.

She never used to smoke but more and more she tells me she can't stand the idea of living to a ripe old age.

Some kind of blue-colored birds are walking around the lawn as if they're looking for a lost contact lens.

You can tell people the truth, but they'll never believe you until the event. Until it's too late. In the meantime, the truth will just piss them off and get you in a lot of trouble.

the biggest factor that makes you a saint is the amount of press coverage you get.

You realize that people take drugs because it's the only real personal adventure left to them in their time-constrained, law-and-order, property-lined world. It's only in drugs or death we'll see anything new, and death is just too controlling.

People shopping for a messiah want quality. Nobody is going to follow a loser. When it comes to choosing a savior, they won't settle for just a human being.

Because the only difference between a suicide and a martyrdom really is the amount of press coverage. If a tree falls in the forest and nobody is there to hear it, doesn't it just lie there and rot? And if Christ had died from a barbiturate overdose, alone on the bathroom floor, would He be in Heaven?

Down onstage, some local preacher was doing his opening act. Part of his warm-up was to get the audience hyperventilated. Loud singing does the job. Or chanting. According to the agent, when people shout this way or sing "Amazing Grace" at the top of their lungs, they breathe too much. People's blood should be acid. When they hyperventilate the carbon dioxide level of their blood drops, and their blood become alkaline.

What we can't understand we call nonsense. What we can't read we call gibberish. There is no free will. There are no variables. "There is only the inevitable," Fertility says. "There's only one future. You don't have a choice."

The bad news is we don't have any control. The good news is you can't make any mistakes.

"The big question people ask isn't 'What's the nature of existence?'" the mouth says. "The big question people ask is 'What's that from?'"

We feel so superior to the dead. For example, if Michelangelo was so damn smart, why'd he die?

Here are condoms lined with a topical anesthetic for prolonged action. What a paradox. You don't feel a thing, but you can fuck for hours. This seems to really miss the point. I want my whole life lined with a topical anesthetic.