I recently read The Night of the Gun by David Carr. Below are the quotes I found interesting. If you like the quotes, buy the book.
The historical self is created to keep dissonance at bay and render the subject palatable in the present. (8)
Tucked in safe suburban redoubts, kids who had it soft like me manufactured peril. When there is no edge, we make our own. (18)
The pub theory of life, that we are all of a common fabric once we have a pint in our hands. (55)
When I got in jams, got divorced, got fired, slipped after treatment, my mother said the same thing: “You are mine. We choose you no matter what.” (75)
By my reckoning, you are issued about a dozen friends in life, and if one of mine happens to be in a prison jumpsuit, well, better him than me, but that doesn’t erase the bond. (87)
As Daniel L. Schacter wrote in The Seven Sins of Memory, “We often edit or entirely rewrite our previous experiences—unknowingly or unconsciously—in light of what we now know or believe.” (115)
The chronicity of addiction is really a kind of fatalism writ large.
Call on God, but row away from the rocks. —HUNTER S. THOMPSON (171)
Fate and circumstance, along with a willingness to punch in, is often all that separates the lucky from the luckless. (176)
I had no idea what I was doing, but children teach you how to parent them. (184)
Like most single parents, I was constantly impaled on a fence between making money to meet my kids’ physical needs and being present to meet their emotional ones. (200)
All the theological debate seemed at one remove, and a higher power was in our midst simply because we needed one to be there. (200)
Having been in rooms with people I owed money to—people who had guns and unknown intent—working in an office where people gossiped about what an idiot I was did not make a strong impression. (258)
Memories may be based on what happened to begin with, but they are reconstituted each time they are recalled—with the most-remembered events frequently the least accurate. What one is remembering is the memory, not the event. (266)
Remembering is an act of assertion as much as recollection. (266)
Los Angeles, where people rise and fall based on some secret chart, New York is a place where the wiring diagram is very visible and fundamentally, oddly, just. If you are good at what you do, work hard, and don’t back down, you can make a place to stand on the island. (269)
We all walk this earth feeling we are frauds. The trick is to be grateful and hope the caper doesn’t end any time soon. When I started trying to remember who I was, I bought an external hard drive, a piece of technology that is designed to preserve the past. (309)
Liked the quotes? Buy the book.
