Jonathan Goldstein Quotes

“Everyone runs around trying to find a place where they still serve breakfast because eating breakfast, even if it's 5 o'clock in the afternoon, is a sign that the day has just begun and good things can still happen. Having lunch is like throwing in the towel.”

— Jonathan Goldstein

Certain voices hold this odd pull on our heartstrings. They are like sad oboes or something, something that makes you want to throw all your money at the radio while yelling, "I love you." I don't know what it is.

— Jonathan Goldstein

“We want more than there is.”

— Jonathan Goldstein

“He rubbed his feet back and forth on the library carpet and when she walked by, he touched her with the tip of his index finger”

— Jonathan Goldstein

In his day, liking someone like David Bowie would have been the domain of degenerate officers in black and white movies about nazis.

— Jonathan Goldstein

“Even so tiny a loss has the power to still feel like a loss.”

— Jonathan Goldstein

When he heard his father call out for Abel and he saw his borther go forth, it made him feel like he was nothing. He couldn't even say that he felt like Cain anymore. One could not feel like Cain because it had no flavor. Cain was the absence of flavor. Cain was like saliva or a Wednesday.

— Jonathan Goldstein

“How do you get over a first love?" he asks.
"You never do," Howard says. "It just stays with you and becomes a part of who you are.”

— Jonathan Goldstein

In sleep things are simpler. No regret over the past. No worry for the future. Only the present. And as bad as a dream gets, at least you get to sleep through it.

— Jonathan Goldstein

“I felt like a young Tony Montana having come to America, except the only person I wanted to kill was myself.”

— Jonathan Goldstein

When David wasn't ruling, he would ponder all the various forms of laughter there could be. So far, he had only categorized four: laughter at your own expense, laughter at the expense of others, laughter at the human predicament, and laughter at small animals falling off tables.

— Jonathan Goldstein

“In the beginning, when Adam was first created, he spent whole days rubbing his face in the grass. He picked his ear until it bled, tried to fit his fist in his mouth and yanked out tufts of his own hair. At one point he tried to pinch out his own eyes in order to examine them and God had to step in.
Looking down at Adam, God must have felt a bit weird about the whole thing. It must have been something like eating at a cafeteria table all by yourself when a stranger suddenly sits down opposite you, but it is a stranger you have created, and he is eating a macaroni salad that you have also created, and you have been sitting at the table all by yourself for over a hundred billion years; and yet still, you have nothing to talk about.
It was pitiful the way Adam looked up into the sky and squinted.
Before He created Adam, God must have been lonely; now he was still lonely, and so was Adam.”

— Jonathan Goldstein

“Reggie made him feel like he was nine years old and out for dinner with his family at the Ponderosa Steak House and he had run into his French teacher and his mother invited her to dine with him.
Reggie made him feel like he was sitting in a public bathroom stall and someone had come into the bathroom and began singing a song about what a stinky bastard he was while he was in there sweating it out.
Reggie made him feel like someone had taken the red Tonka fire engine he had always wanted and painfully corkscrewed it down the front of his jeans.
Reggie made him feel like the ice cream man had just rolled by and all his dead grandparents were mooning him out the truck window.”

— Jonathan Goldstein

“If you could jerk off to something else, like a hamburger, could you imagine the delight in being alive?”

— Jonathan Goldstein

What is it about legs? Or what is it about breasts? Or the small of the back? What is it about anything? One day there will be no difference between anything. It'll all be the exact same thing. One day you'll look in the dictionary and there will be only one word and you'll just have to make do.

— Jonathan Goldstein

“How strange to feel yourself falling in love with someone you've only just met.”

— Jonathan Goldstein

“But I am enjoying the feeling of inbetweenness - that not-yet-being-settled feeling - and I plan on dragging it out as long as I can, because its a state of grace where all things are permissible.”

— Jonathan Goldstein

“And of course there was the loss of women, some of whom he still woke up aching for. He'd study their remnants alone at night - slips of paper bearing old phone numbers. Photographs. A mitten. In bed he would stare at the ceiling, trying to seize on the exact feeling of a particular woman's head on his chest. It's weight, the smell of her hair.”

— Jonathan Goldstein

“As you get older you strip away the things you don't have time for, and then you are left with only the things you have time for. Your life gets skinnier and skinnier until you wonder why you go on. You go on because there are things that must get done. You become no longer a person so much as a place, an unfunny place where things come to get done.”

— Jonathan Goldstein

“By going "ah" and "hah" they were able to lift the unrelenting pain of their dark, bestial days into something more recreational. It is only through the godly gift of humor that man endures the horror. What other faculty allows you to turn pain into triumph? Tears of sadness into tears of laughing too hard?”

— Jonathan Goldstein

“I turn on my computer to search Craigslist for apartment listings. The wireless window pops up, and I realize with some regret that all I know about my neighbours is their wireless network names: Krypton, Space balls, Couscous, and Scarlet. From this I can tell little else than that they're fans of Superman, Mel Brooks, Middle Eastern cuisine, and the colour red. I look out my window, wondering whose house is whose and what private food and entertainment consumption occurs in each and how I will never get to know.”

— Jonathan Goldstein