Survivor: A Novel

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.

Call me a sexual predator, but when I think of predators I think of lions, tigers, big cats, sharks. This isn’t so much a predator versus prey relationship. This isn’t a scavenger, a vulture, or a laughing hyena versus a carcass. This isn’t a parasite versus a host. We’re all miserable together. It’s the opposite of a victimless crime.

The truth is you can be orphaned again and again and again. The truth is you will be. And the secret is, this will hurt less and less each time until you can’t feel a thing.

“Actually, it’s awfully boring stuff. Anticipating the future based on the past. We might as well be an insurance company; nevertheless, it’s our job to make cult suicide look fresh and exciting every time around.”

“The way this works is we copyright every conceivable combination of words, Greek words, Latin, English, what-have-you. We get the legal rights to every conceivable word a pharmaceutical company might use to name a new product. For diabetes alone, we have an inventory of one hundred forty names,”

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.

It’s only in drugs or death we’ll see anything new, and death is just too controlling.

Because the only difference between a suicide and a martyrdom

People used what they called a telephone because they hated being close together and they were too scared of being alone.