“It is important not to show too many inches at once.”

About twenty pages into Luke B. Goebel’s Fourteen Stories, None of Them Are Yours, I realized I was reading with one hand holding my forehead and one balled at my waist, kind of clenched, and gazing down into the paper like a man soon to be converged upon.

If we insist on being as sure as is conceivable… we must be content to creep along the ground, and never soar.

When I was a kid my primary goal in life was to find a book that was alive. Not alive in the human sense, but like a thing that would send me to a place not otherwise accessible on Earth.

I’ve actually started to think that it’s a purer state for people. Because he operates as if he’s a child and everything is new, which seems more honest.

And so language for me doesn’t reflect the world, it extends the world, so that it becomes larger and more fantastic and less mired in this school shooting bullshit. It actually builds a future – that’s how evolution occurs.

I like smartasses, because I can be smartass back and rashy.

The things that language stands for do not require humans, and in fact are often trampled down by humans.

I logically don’t believe that all this stuff [surrounding us] is generated from dust. But I’m also not like “Jesus Christ came down to save us.” It’s almost selfish to think that human beings, on this plane of reality, are the end of it.

What if life after death is all based within memory: you die, and you don’t ascend on a bed of clouds to Jesus, but your brain has a terrain that it can use to propel itself further.

I am a serial monogamist of sorts, and have been with my girlfriend for almost four years.

An inch of progress is worth more than a yard of complaint.

Baseball is only a game, a game of inches and a lot of luck. During a time of all-out war, sports are very insignificant.

I will take back Kashmir, all of it, and I will not leave behind a single inch of it because, like the other provinces, it belongs to Pakistan.

I sent her a bottle of the most expensive wine on the menu. She sent me a note: “I will not touch a drop of this wine unless you can assure me that you have seven inches in your pants. ” So I wrote back: “Give me the wine. As gorgeous as you are, I’m not cutting off three inches for anyone.

The greatest distance in the world is the 14 inches from our minds to our hearts.