“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.”

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.

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

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.

Take away winning, and you take away everything that is strong about America.

If Christ lives in us, we will rejoice in everything, and we will thank and praise the Lord. We will say, ‘Hallelujah! Praise the Lord’ forever.

I want nothing for myself; I want everything for the Lord.

He who is able to accept everything gladly from the Lord – including darkness, dryness, flatness – and completely disregard self is he who lives for Him.

The Lord has shown me that I can do anything, but that He has said, apart from Me ye can do nothing. So it comes to this, that everything I have done, and can still do apart from Him is nothing!

It’s when you get to 60 when everything starts to go pear-shaped. Everyone thinks that becoming an older guy is easy, but you never consider it fully. It comes as quite a shock.

Human nature is to blame for everything, innit? We’re just a disease on this planet.

In Los Angeles all the loose objects in the country were collected, as if America had been tilted and everything that wasn’t tightly screwed down had slid into Southern California.