Bart Yates Quotes
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The librarian is a caricature of librarian - short white hair, horn-rimmed glasses, a bosom you could hide Christmas presents under and a New England-tight-ass face that looks like she hasn's taken a shit since her family came over on the Mayflower.
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Want to know the biggest lie ever written? 'Tis better to have loved and lost than never to have loved at all.
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Every time a book opens, an angel coughs up a hairball.
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Maybe physical intimacy isn't always about touching. Maybe it's also about being able to sit next to someone at dinner and not care if he takes something off your plate or reaches across you for the salt. Maybe it's about being able to sprawl out on the floor and read a book in the same room with someone who's grading papers and muttering about 'incompetent boobs who couldn't write a good paper if their lives depended on it.' Maybe it's about sharing the same space with another person and not going fucking crazy because you can't get away from them. That's it, I guess: true intimacy is really just the run of the mill, day to day stuff that happens without thinking—thousands of simple, meaningless, comfortable ways you can be close to someone, never dreaming how shitty you'll feel when you wake up one morning with all of it gone.
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It's not about love. Of course I love the little shit. But he knows too much about me that no one else on the planet knows, and when he's around I have no choice but to think about everything I hate about myself and my past. He's a gangrenous leg attached to my psyche, and I need to hack him off before he infects my whole fucking soul.
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Love doesn’t "grow." It doesn’t wait for you to discover it, it doesn’t fall like a gentle rain from the sky, it doesn’t tiptoe into your heart like a happy little bunny, and it doesn’t have a fucking thing to do with familiarity. Love is neither patient nor kind. Love attacks. It sneaks up like a pride of lions or a pack of hyenas and eats your heart out while you watch. Love is the bully on the playground who takes your lunch money and gives you a black eye in return, the arsonist who burns your house down with you in it, the witch who lures you into her home with candy and boils you alive for dinner. Love is raw, and violent, and instantaneous. You don’t fall in love; you get trampled by it.
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With Tommy, gift-giving is an art form. Whatever he bestows on you is more likely than not going to be something absurd and cheap and tacky, but the way he offers it always makes you feel as if you were receiving an oblation. I don’t know how he does it. It’s a bizarre kind of magic; he somehow makes you believe that the useless thing in his outstretched hands is actually a chunk of his heart that he’s torn out, just for you. He holds it up for your inspection, and it glows between his fingers like a candle in a cave. And as if that weren’t enough, he makes it absolutely clear that he doesn’t want anything in return, not even your gratitude, so all you can do is stand there with a stupefied look on your face and humbly accept what he’s vouchsafing you.
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Hygiene is for people like me; I’ve reached an age where I can no longer afford to smell like myself.
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Yeah, I know what the shrinks say: "Conflict and conflict resolution are the mainstays of human intimacy." That fatuous little axiom may be true, but it presupposes that human intimacy is a desirable thing. I have never been nearly as happy with somebody else in the room as I am when I’m by myself. It seems to me that loneliness is a small price to pay for peace and quiet.
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But, Jesus, Tommy, what do you expect me to say? I grew up with you. When we were kids your fly was open more often than the twenty-four-hour laundromat. If your dick had been a gun you could have outdrawn Doc Holliday.
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But some things never change. No matter what else happens in the universe—the fall of communism, the destruction of the ozone, the death of punk rock, whatever—you can at least put your faith in one thing: If a man is pretty, available, and breathing, Tommy will stick his dick in him.
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I once heard some idiot on the radio saying that all great art has suffering as its dominant theme, and that the greatest artists are only able to create because they suffer immensely in their own lives. What a bunch of bullshit. Look at Van Gogh's paintings: there's as much joy in them as there is pain. Suffering is only a single color, and by itself it's boring.
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Loneliness is just a permanent fact of life. And if you buy into the illusion that you can somehow escape it, you’re in for a world of hurt. Want to know the biggest lie ever written? ’Tis better to have loved and lost than never to have loved at all. What an unmitigated pile of shit.
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Sprawled out on the front lawn/ looking up at an ordinary sky/ it could fall on me and some how be/ the day I didn't die.
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Sometimes you hurt people for no reason. Just because you can.
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The best hours of my life have been spent in a quiet corner or under a tree or on the beach with a book in my hands. I’ve been told on more than one occasion that I should stop reading so much and actually have a life, but do you know what I’ve figured out? People in books are much more interesting than the people who’ve told me that.
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Where does a child of mine get all that hair, I wonder? Arthur’s not exceptionally hirsute, and the men on my side of the family are as bald as potatoes. I must have had an affair with a gorilla before he was born, but you’d think I’d remember something like that, wouldn’t you? ... Be a dear and remind me to leave my brandy flask at home the next time I visit the zoo.
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It seems to be that loneliness is a small price to pay for peace and quiet.
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He adores you, you know. You’re very lucky to have a brother like that.” I fall into step with her. “Yeah, right, I’m the luckiest guy in the universe.” I heave a sigh. “But in my next life I’d prefer a puppy, okay?
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I should probably apologize for how much I swear, but fuck it. I've read that some people think swearing shows a lack of imagination and a limited vocabulary, but sometimes "darn" and "poop" and "oh heck" just don't cut it. Besides, swearing is kind of fun.