The Mars Room
Rachel Kushner
Top 10 Best Quotes
“A man could say every day that he wanted to change his life, was going to change it, and every day the lament became merely a part of the life he was already living, so that the desire for change was in fact a kind of stasis that allowed the unchanged life to continue, because at least the man knew to disapprove of it, which reassured him not all was lost.”
“The thing is you keep existing whether you have a plan to do so or not, until you don’t exist, and then your plans are meaningless.”
“Things are more complicated than some can admit. People are stupider and less demonic than some can admit.”
“The word violence was depleted and generic from overuse and yet it still had power, still meant something, but multiple things. There were stark acts of it: beating a person to death. And there were more abstract forms, depriving people of jobs, safe housing, adequate schools. There were large-scale acts of it, the deaths of tens of thousands of Iraqi civilians in a single year, for a specious war of lies and bungling, a war that might have no end, but according to prosecutors, the real monsters were teenagers like Button Sanchez.”
“You would not have gone. I understand that. You would not have gone up to his room. You would not have asked him for help. You would not have been wandering lost at midnight at age eleven. You would have been safe and dry and asleep, at home with your mother and father who cared about you and had rules, curfews, expectations. Everything for you would have been different. But if you were me, you would have done what I did. You would have gone, hopeful and stupid, to get the money for the taxi.”
“No Tank Tops, the sign had said at Youth Guidance. Because it was presumed the parents didn’t know better than to show up to court looking like hell. The sign might have said Your Poverty Reeks.”
“Crazy people only lose their cunning last, if they ever lose it.”
“What I eventually came to understand, about San Francisco, was that I was immersed in beauty and barred from seeing it.”
“Where people are gone the night falls upward, black and unmanned.”
“It’s hard to live on the streets. In prison, you can be someone. Life has order if you know how to do time, and I know. I’m an expert. Living in a tent is a temporary thing. You do it until you go back to prison. That’s just how it works.”
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Book Keywords:
child-rearing, night, poverty, nature