Joshua Ferris Quotes

I know what to do with my life. I just don't know what to do with this one night.

To conform is to lose your soul

All broken hearts are circumstantial. Every lovelorn jerk is the victim of bad timing, good intentions, and someone else’s poor decision making.

I think it's a very bad idea for someone to start writing for a readership.

It is forgivable to say nothing out of ignorance; it's inexcusable to remain silent once awareness dawns.

We suffered failures of imagination just like everyone else, our daring was wanting, and our daily contentment too nearly adequate for us to give it up.

It is really irritating to work with irritating people

I come from a very illustrious line of divorces. We love to get divorced in my family. My mother and father have been married four times each - eight ceremonies with the best of intentions.

A dentist is only half the doctor he claims to be.

I've always thought things were absurd. It would take a lot more effort for me to see things as reasonable.

You think I alienate myself from society? Of course I alienate myself from society. It’s the only way I know of not being constantly reminded of all the ways I’m alienated from society.

We loved killing time and had perfected several ways of doing so. We wandered the hallways carrying papers that indicated some mission of business when in reality we were in search of free candy.

We found ourselves wanting to hurry time along, which was not in the long run good for our health. Everybody was trapped in this contradiction but nobody ever dared to articulate it.

One thing that I discovered about myself is I really don't like traveling. I feel like it's a terrible personal failing, but I was so satisfied to arrive at the conclusion.

We're no longer dealing in the world of the real in a truthful way. We're interacting with each other in shiny homepages. I don't think that makes for honest communication.

Being serious is serious business in fiction. It's commercial or hoi polloi in fiction to be funny. It's too accessible to the great unwashed.

If you can get by with quotes from The Godfather and nothing you say matters, that's pretty bleak, don't you think? Don't we want what we say to matter?

Everyone desires relationships and community. Most people want to belong to a cohesive, like-minded group. It staves off loneliness. It promotes identity. These are natural and very human instincts.

I have never stopped considering not becoming a writer.

Things could be worse and things could be so much better.

That's one of the things about comedy - I think it works best when it's contextualized, as opposed to kind of an island of cleverness.

Humor is a very big part of life, and if you exclude humor from your book, you're not capturing a very important part of human experience.

Everything was always something but something – and here was the rub – could never be everything.

A multifaceted writer, very easy on the surface to pin down but incredibly difficult once you actually read him with any depth.

We had the great good fortune and shortcomings of character that marked every generation that had never seen war.

We were fractious and overpaid. Our mornings lacked promise. At least those of us who smoked had something to look forward to at ten-fifteen.

We told him to get on with it. We liked wasting time, but almost nothing was more annoying than having our wasted time wasted on something not worth wasting it on.

Without work, so much of one's identity just evaporates.

My first job is to write a book that I believe is compelling and deserves the long sustained attention that any novel requires, and to worry about the commerce only late in the game.

I wake up every day in order to do something that's quixotic, and not necessarily called for in the world, but I do it because there's extraordinary meaning for me behind the effort.

The main questions of everyday life are too enormous to answer in any definitive sense.

I think we’re losing sight of what our ultimate goal is here, ” said Genevieve. But we feared that if she was washed out, people would look right past the flyer.

For all our penny-wisdom, ’” he said, “‘for all our soul-destroying slavery to habit, it is not to be doubted that all men have sublime thoughts.

One thing we knew for certain- despite all our certainties, it was very difficult to guess what one individual was thinking at any given moment.

We had these sudden revelations that employment, the daily nine-to-five, was driving us far from our better selves.

Some people would never forget certain people, a few people would remember everyone, and most of us would mostly be forgotten.

They were like two inviolable spheres touching at a fine point in their curves, touching but failing to penetrate, failing to breathe the other's air.

What separated the living from one another could be as impenetrable as whatever barrier separated the living from the dead.