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Slaughterhouse 90210
By Maris Kreizman Flatiron Books
Copyright © 2015 Maris Kreizman
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-250-06112-6
CHAPTER 1
EVERYTHING WAS BEAUTIFUL AND NOTHING HURT.
— Kurt Vonnegut, Slaughterhouse-Five
It is curious what patches of hardness and tenderness lie side by side in men's dispositions. I suppose he has some test by which he finds out whom Heaven cares for.
— George Eliot, Middlemarch
Coherence and closure are deep human desires that are presently unfashionable. But they are always both frightening and enchantingly desirable. "Falling in love," characteristically, combs the appearances of the word, and of the particular lover's history, out of a random tangle and into a coherent plot.
— A. S. Byatt, Possession
Life is an endless recruiting of witnesses. It seems we need to be observed in our postures of extravagance or shame, we need attention paid to us. Our own memory is altogether too cherishing, which is the kindest thing I can say for it. Other accounts are required, other perspectives, but even so our most important ceremonies — birth, love, and death — are secured by whomever and whatever is available. What chance, what caprice!
— Carol Shields, The Stone Diaries
Above all, she is the girl who "feels" things, who has hung on to the freshness and pain of adolescence, the girl ever wounded, ever young.
— Joan Didion, Slouching Towards Bethlehem
A man's subconscious self is not the ideal companion. It lurks for the greater part of his life in some dark den of its own, hidden away, and emerges only to taunt and deride and increase the misery of a miserable hour.
— P. G. Wodehouse, The Adventures of Sally
When you find out who you are, you will no longer be innocent. That will be sad for others to see. All that knowledge will show on your face and change it. But sad only for others, not for yourself. You will feel you have a kind of wisdom, very mistaken, but a mistake of some power to you and so you will sadly treasure it and grow it.
— Lorrie Moore, A Gate at the Stairs
Yet, I didn't understand that she was intentionally disguising her feelings with sarcasm; that was usually the last resort of people who are timid and chaste of heart, whose souls have been coarsely and impudently invaded; and who, until the last moment, refuse to yield out of pride and are afraid to express their own feelings to you.
— Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Notes from Underground
I HAVE AN IDEA THAT THE ONLY THING WHICH MAKES IT POSSIBLE TO REGARD THIS WORLD WE LIVE IN WITHOUT DISGUST IS THE BEAUTY WHICH NOW AND THEN MEN CREATE OUT OF THE CHAOS.
— W. Somerset Maugham, The Painted Veil
I GUESS THIS IS WHAT MARRIAGE IS, OR WAS, OR COULD BE. YOU DROP THE MASK. YOU ALLOW THE FATIGUE IN. YOU LEAN ACROSS AND KISS THE YEARS BECAUSE THEY'RE THE THINGS THAT MATTER.
— Colum McCann, Let the Great World Spin
A rowdy bunch on the whole, they were most of them so violently individualistic as to be practically interchangeable.
— Elaine Dundy, The Dud Avocado
It doesn't matter what you do. In the end, you are going to be judged, and all the times that you're not at your most dignified are the ones that will be recalled in all their vivid, heartbreaking detail. And then of course these things will be distorted and exaggerated and replayed over and over, until eventually they turn into the essence of you: your cartoon.
— Dan Chaon, Among the Missing
AT THE AGE OF ELEVEN OR THEREABOUTS WOMEN ACQUIRE A POISE AND AN ABILITY TO HANDLE DIFFICULT SITUATIONS WHICH A MAN, IF HE IS LUCKY, MANAGES TO ACHIEVE SOMEWHERE IN THE LATER SEVENTIES.
— P. G. Wodehouse, Uneasy Money
For most of us, the experience of love, even if it doesn't work out — perhaps especially when it doesn't work out — promises that here is one thing that validates, that vindicates life. And though subsequent years might alter this view, until some of us give up on it altogether, when love first strikes there's nothing like it, is there? Agreed?
— Julian Barnes, The Sense of an Ending
People want to be bowled over by something special. Nine times out of ten you can forget, but that tenth time, that peak experience, is what people want. That's what can move the world. That's art.
— Haruki Murakami, South of the Border, West of the Sun
There are levels of readiness. Young girls don't entertain the idea of sex, their body and another's together. That comes later, but there isn't nothing before. There's an innocent displacement, a dreaming, and idols are perfect for a little girl's dreaming.
— Rachel Kushner, The Flamethrowers
Privilege, you see, is one of the great adversaries of the imagination; it spreads a thick layer of adipose tissue over our sensitivity.
— Chinua Achebe, Hopes and Impediments: Selected Essays
I MEET A PERSON, AND IN MY MIND I'M SAYING THREE MINUTES; I GIVE YOU THREE MINUTES TO SHOW ME THE SPARK.
— The Collected Stories of Amy Hempel
As he took her hand she saw him look her over from head to foot, a gesture she recognized and that made her feel at home, but gave her always a faint feeling of superiority to whoever made it. If her person was property she could exercise whatever advantage was inherent in its ownership.
— F. Scott Fitzgerald, Tender Is the Night
VAIN TRIFLES AS THEY SEEM, CLOTHES HAVE, THEY SAY, MORE IMPORTANT OFFICES THAN TO MERELY KEEP US WARM. THEY CHANGE OUR VIEW OF THE WORLD AND THE WORLD'S VIEW OF US.
— Virginia Woolf, Orlando
What is interesting and important happens mostly in secret, in places where there is no power. Nothing much of lasting value ever happens at the head table, held together by a familiar rhetoric. Those who already have power continue to glide along the familiar rut they have made for themselves.
— Michael Ondaatje, The Cat's Table
Many kids, it seemed, would find out that their parents were flawed, messed-up people later in life, and I didn't appreciate getting to know it all so strong and early.
— Aimee Bender, The Particular Sadness of Lemon Cake
She was always planning out her own development, desiring her own perfection, observing her own progress. Her nature had for her own imagination a certain garden-like quality, a suggestion of perfume and murmuring bows, of shady bowers and of lengthening vistas, which made her feel that introspection was, after all, an exercise in the open air, and that a visit to the recesses of one's mind was harmless when one returned from it with a lapful of roses.
— Henry James, The Portrait of a Lady
Love demands expression. It will not stay still, stay silent, be good, be modest, be seen and not heard, no. It will break out in tongues of praise, the high note that smashes the glass and spills the liquid.
— Jeanette Winterson, Written on the Body
IT OFTEN HAPPENS THAT THINGS ARE OTHER THAN WHAT THEY SEEM, AND YOU CAN GET YOURSELF INTO TROUBLE BY JUMPING TO CONCLUSIONS.
— Paul Auster, Moon Palace
She discovered with great delight that one does not love one's children just because they are one's children but because of the friendship formed while raising them.
— Gabriel García Márquez, Love in the Time of Cholera
Whenever I saw her, I felt like I had been living in another country, doing moderately well in another language, and then she showed up speaking English and suddenly I could speak with all the complexity and nuance that I hadn't realized was gone. With Lucy I was a native speaker.
— Ann Patchett, Truth & Beauty
She had the air of a supervisor, a cheerful but vigilant overseer — or perhaps the air of a woman who would assume that role whether she had any official superiority or not.
— Alice Munro, Runaway
Let truth be told — women do as a rule live through such humiliations, and regain their spirits, and again look about them with an interested eye. While there's life there's hope is a conviction not so entirely unknown to the "betrayed" as some amiable theorists would have us believe.
— Thomas Hardy, Tess of the d'Urbervilles
Happiness was different in childhood. It was so much then a matter simply of accumulation, of taking things — new experiences, new emotions — and applying them like so many polished tiles to what would someday be the marvellously finished pavilion of the self.
— John Banville, The Sea
HUMAN MADNESS IS OFTENTIMES A CUNNING AND MOST FELINE THING. WHEN YOU THINK IT FLED, IT MAY HAVE BUT BECOME TRANSFIGURED INTO SOME STILL SUBTLER FORM.
— Herman Melville, Moby-Dick
There is so much hurt in this game of searching for a mate, of testing, trying. And you realize suddenly that you forgot it was a game, and turn away in tears.
— The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath
In the little world in which children have their existence, whosoever brings them up, there is nothing so finely perceived and so finely felt as injustice.
— Charles Dickens, Great Expectations
Although I have never been an actor in the strict sense of the word, I have nevertheless in real life always carried about with me a small folding theatre and have appeared in more than one part.
— Vladimir Nabokov, Despair
Imagination, of course, can open any door — turn the key and let terror walk right in.
— Truman Capote, In Cold Blood
An infinity of passion can be contained in one minute, like a crowd in a small space.
— Gustave Flaubert, Madame Bovary
WITHIN THE SOULS OF THE AWKWARD AND THE OVERLOOKED OFTEN BURNS SOMETHING RADIANT.
— Jo Ann Beard, In Zanesville
Look at me. My concerns — are they spiritual, do you think, or carnal? Come on. We've read our Shakespeare.
— The Collected Stories of Amy Hempel
There are no conditions to which a person cannot grow accustomed, especially if he sees that everyone around him lives in the same way.
— Leo Tolstoy, Anna Karenina
We are such inward secret creatures, that inwardness is the most amazing thing about us, even more amazing than our reason. But we cannot just walk into the cavern and look around. Most of what we think we know about our minds is pseudo-knowledge. We are all such shocking poseurs, so good at inflating the importance of what we think we value.
— Iris Murdoch, The Sea, the Sea
"I FEEL LIKE PEOPLE ACCEPT THE FIRST THING I SHOW THEM," SHE SAID, "AND THAT'S ALL I EVER AM TO THEM."
— Mary Gaitskill, Don't Cry
EVERY HERO BECOMES A BORE AT LAST.
— Ralph Waldo Emerson, Representative Men: Seven Lectures
Who has not asked himself at some time or other: am I a monster or is this what it means to be a person?
— Clarice Lispector, The Hour of the Star
Anyone too undisciplined, too self-righteous or too self-centered to live in the world as it is has a tendency to idealize a world which ought to be. But no matter what political or religious direction such idealists choose, their visions always share one telling characteristic: in their utopias, heavens or brave new worlds, their greatest personal weakness suddenly appears to be a strength.
— David James Duncan, The Brothers K
I UNDERSTOOD THAT IN THIS SMALL SPACE OF TIME WE HAD MUTUALLY SURRENDERED OUR LONELINESS AND REPLACED IT WITH TRUST.
— Patti Smith, Just Kids
And what made these heart-to-hearts possible — you might even say what made the whole friendship possible during that time — was this understanding we had that anything we told each other during these moments would be treated with careful respect.
— Kazuo Ishiguro, Never Let Me Go
All male friendships are essentially quixotic: they last only so long as each man is willing to polish the shaving-bowl helmet, climb on his donkey, and ride off after the other in pursuit of illusive glory and questionable adventure.
— Michael Chabon, Wonder Boys
The challenge is to resist circumstances. Any idiot can be happy in a happy place, but moral courage is required to be happy in a hellhole.
— Joyce Carol Oates, Mudwoman
AS A GENERAL RULE, PEOPLE, EVEN THE WICKED, ARE MUCH MORE NAIVE AND SIMPLE-HEARTED THAN WE SUPPOSED. AND WE OURSELVES ARE, TOO.
— Fyodor Dostoyevsky, The Brothers Karamazov
All things truly wicked start from innocence.
— Ernest Hemingway, A Moveable Feast
Humor is what happens when we're told the truth quicker and more directly than we're used to.
— George Saunders, The Braindead Megaphone
HOW OLD DO YOU HAVE TO GET BEFORE WISDOM DESCENDS LIKE A PLASTIC BAG OVER YOUR HEAD AND YOU LEARN TO KEEP YOUR BIG MOUTH SHUT? MAYBE NEVER. MAYBE YOU GET MORE FRIVOLOUS WITH AGE.
— Margaret Atwood, The Robber Bride
Some of our loves and attachments are elemental and beyond our choosing, and for that very reason they come spiced with pain and regret and need and hollowness and a feeling as close to anger as I will ever be able to imagine.
— Colm Tóibín, Mothers and Sons
But after a moment the sense of waste and ruin overcame him. There they were, close together and safe and shut in; yet so chained to their separate destinies that they might as well have been half the world apart.
— Edith Wharton, The Age of Innocence
This is what I thought: for the most banal event to become an adventure, you must (and this is enough) begin to recount it.
— Jean-Paul Sartre, Nausea
I believe that one can never leave home. I believe that one carries the shadows, the dreams, the fears and the dragons of home under one's skin, at the extreme corners of one's eyes and possibly in the gristle of the earlobe.
— Maya Angelou, Letter to My Daughter
I was tired of so much thinking, which is what I did most in those days. I did other things, but I went on thinking while I did them. I might feel something, but I would think about what I was feeling at the same time. I even had to think about what I was thinking and wonder why I was thinking about it.
— Lydia Davis, Almost No Memory
If you want to think about something really funny, kiddo, consider the fact that our favorite modern bad guys became villains by serving as heroes first — to millions. It is now a necessary apprenticeship.
— William H. Gass, The Tunnel
What if one happens to be possessed of a heart that can't be trusted —? What if the heart, for its own unfathomable reasons, leads one willfully and in a cloud of unspeakable radiance away from health, domesticity, civic responsibility and strong social connections and all the blandly-held common virtues and instead straight towards a beautiful flare of ruin, self-immolation, disaster?
— Donna Tartt, The Goldfinch
WHAT'S FRIENDSHIP'S REALEST MEASURE? I'LL TELL YOU. THE AMOUNT OF PRECIOUS TIME YOU'LL SQUANDER ON SOMEONE ELSE'S CALAMITIES AND FUCK-UPS.
— Richard Ford, The Sportswriter
It's a very Greek idea, and a very profound one. Beauty is terror. Whatever we call beautiful, we quiver before it. And what could be more terrifying and beautiful, to souls like the Greeks or our own, than to lose control completely? To throw off the chains of being for an instant, to shatter the accident of our mortal selves?
— Donna Tartt, The Secret History
We are so convinced of the goodness of ourselves, and the goodness of our love, we cannot bear to believe that there might be something more worthy of love than us, more worthy of worship. Greeting cards routinely tell us everybody deserves love. No. Everybody deserves clean water. Not everybody deserves love all the time.
— Zadie Smith, White Teeth
A most mediocre person can be the object of a love which is wild, extravagant, and beautiful as the poison lilies of the swamp.
— Carson McCullers, The Ballad of the Sad Café
But in life, a tragedy is not one long scream. It includes everything that led up to it. Hour after trivial hour, day after day, year after year, and then the sudden moment: the knife stab, the shell burst, the plummet of the car from a bridge.
— Margaret Atwood, The Blind Assassin
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Slaughterhouse 90210 by Maris Kreizman. Copyright © 2015 Maris Kreizman. Excerpted by permission of Flatiron Books.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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