Peter Cameron Quotes

“What if she was meant to be, or could have been, someone important in my life? I think that's what scares me: the randomness of everything. That the people who could be important to you might just pass you by. Or you pass them by. How do you know ... I felt that by walking away I was abandoning [them], that I spent my entire life, day after day, abandoning people.”

— Peter Cameron

“People who have only good experiences aren't very interesting. They may be content, and happy after a fashion, but they aren't very deep. It may seem a misfortune now, and it makes things difficult, but well
it's easy to feel all the happy, simple stuff. Not that happiness is necessarily simple. But I don't think you're going to have a life like that, and I think you'll be the better for it. The difficult thing is to not be overwhelmed by the bad patches. You must not let them defeat you. You must see them as a gift
a cruel gift, but a gift nonetheless.”

— Peter Cameron

“I felt this awful obligation to be charming or at least have something to say, and the pressure of having to be charming (or merely verbal) incapacitates me.”

— Peter Cameron

“I wish the whole day were like breakfast, when people are still connected to their dreams, focused inward, and not yet ready to engage with the world around them. I realized this is how I am all day; for me, unlike other people, there doesn't come a moment after a cup of coffee or a shower or whatever when I suddenly feel alive and awake and connected to the world. If it were always breakfast, I would be fine.”

— Peter Cameron

“I hate when people say 'I see'. It doesn't mean anything and I think it's hostile. Whenever anyone tells me 'I see' I think they're really saying 'Fuck you'.”

— Peter Cameron

“I often feel like I want to think something but I can't find the language that coincides with the thoughts, so it remains felt, not thought. Sometimes I feel like I'm thinking in Swedish without knowing Swedish.”

— Peter Cameron

“I only feel like myself when I am alone.”

— Peter Cameron

I knew my mother was right, but that didn't change the way I felt about things. People always think that if they can prove they're right, you'll change your mind.

— Peter Cameron

I found the idea of being a librarian very appealing
working in a place where people had to whisper and only speak when necessary. If only the world were like that!

— Peter Cameron

“I always looked forward to being an adult, because I thought the adult world was, well-adult. That adults weren't cliquey or nasty, that the whole notion of being cool, or in, or popular would case to be the arbiter of all things social, but I was beginning to realize that the adult world was as nonsensically brutal and socially perilous as the kingdom of childhood.”

— Peter Cameron

“Interacting with other people does not come naturally to me; it is a strain and requires effort, and since it does not come naturally I feel like I am not really myself when I make that effort. I feel fairly comfortable with my family, but even with them I sometimes feel the strain of not being alone.”

— Peter Cameron

“New York is strange in the summer. Life goes on as usual but it's not, it's like everyone is just pretending, as if everyone has been cast as the star in a movie about their life, so they're one step removed from it. And then in September it all gets normal again.”

— Peter Cameron

Most people think things are not real unless they are spoken, that it's the uttering of something, not the thinking of it, that legitimizes it. I suppose this is why people always want other people to say "I love you." I think just the opposite - that thoughts are realest when thought, that expressing them distorts or dilutes them, that it is best for them to stay in the dark climate-controlled airport chapel of your mind, that if they're released into the air and light they will be affected in a way that alters them, like film accidentally exposed.

— Peter Cameron

Sometimes I envy religious people for the comfort of believing. It would make everything so much easier.

— Peter Cameron

“One man's nonsense is another man's sense.”

— Peter Cameron

“Are you okay?' she asked me.
Of course,' I said. 'Why wouldn't I be okay?'
There are lots of reasons why you might not be okay.'
There are lots of reasons why anyone might not be okay,' I said.”

— Peter Cameron

I'm not a sociopath or a freak (although I don't suppose people who are sociopaths or freaks self-identify as such); I just don't enjoy being with people. People, at least in my experience, rarely say anything interesting to each other. They always talk about their lives and they don't have very interesting lives. So I get impatient. For some reason I think you should only say something if it's interesting or absolutely has to be said.

— Peter Cameron

I don't know why I felt so closed and bitter and threatened by the things I did not like.

— Peter Cameron

“It seemed that everyone else could mate, could fit their parts together in pleasant and productive ways, but that some almost indistinguishable difference in my anatomy and psyche set me slightly, yet irrevocably, apart.”

— Peter Cameron

“It wouldn't kill you to get me an iced coffee."
"No, but not getting killed doing something is not a very compelling reason to do it.”

— Peter Cameron

“I don't think I could ever work in such a blatantly hierarchical corporate setting. I know that everyone in this world is not equal, but I can't bear environments that make this truth so obvious.”

— Peter Cameron

“Just ignore him and he'll go away, my mother used to say to Gillian when we were young and I bugged her. Just ignore him. All he wants is attention. In retrospect there seems to be something almost cruel about that-to simultaneously acknowledge and refuse someone's desire for attention-especially a child's. All he wants is attention, as if it's bad to want attention, like wanting money or power or fame.”

— Peter Cameron

Dr. Adler had instructed me to always say whatever I was thinking, but this was difficult for me, for the act of thinking and the act of articulating those thoughts were not synchronous to me, or even necessarily consecutive. I knew that I thought and spoke in the same language and that theoretically there should be no reason why I could not express my thoughts as they occurred or soon thereafter, but the language in which I thought and the language in which I spoke, though both English, often seemed divided by a gap that could not be simultaneously, or even retrospectively, bridged.

— Peter Cameron

“I thought the best thing to do would be nothing, and in that way things couldn't get any worse.”

— Peter Cameron

I think therapy is a rather misguided notion of capitalist societies whereby the self-indulgent examination of one's life supersedes the actual living of said life.

— Peter Cameron

She had all the best things wrong with her-incest, insanity, drug addiction, bulimia, alopecia: you name it. All the perfect stuff for a memoir. She's so lucky.

— Peter Cameron

And the boys were all clean, their faces freshly and brutally shaved, their hair painstakingly gelled into exquisite apparent carelessness, with this electric feeling inside of them, which matched the feelings in the girls, that they were all ascending, moving into a future that could only improve them, and I wondered what it was like - the miracle, the stupidity of feeling that.

— Peter Cameron

“I hate stand-up comics; I think funny is something you are, not something you desperately try to be in front of a roomful of obnoxious people.”

— Peter Cameron

“Unfortunately I have never been good in math. Numbers simply do not interest me or seem as real to me as words.”

— Peter Cameron

“It was strange to see someone you have only known alone begin interacting with other people, for that somebody known to you disappears and is replaced by a different, more complex, person. You watch him revolve in this new company, revealing new facets, and there is nothing you can do but hope you like these other sides as much as you like the side that seemed whole when it faced only you.”

— Peter Cameron

“I actually grew fond of her in a nastily superior kind of way. For she was so completely artless and optimistic and clueless, she didn't care that she smelled bad or was fat or wore clothes unlike everyone else's, she had some weird disconnect with life that kept her constantly bubbling, and you knew she would go blithely through her long horribly boring life thinking every thing was just swell (the opposite of me).”

— Peter Cameron

“But are you glad you went to college? Was it a good experience?"
I suppose it was. Althought I can't remember a single thing I learned. Except for Latin, and that's only because the nuns literally beat it into us and I use it sometimes for the crossword."
There were nuns at Radcliffe?"
Yes, it was all nuns."
Are you sure? At Radcliffe?"
Maybe it was high school."
But you aren't Catholic," I said. "I don't think you ever went to a parochial school."
Well, I distinctly remember nuns with sticks walking up and down the aisles as we recited Latin. Maybe it was a show I was in, but I doubt it because nuns don't beat children in musicals.”

— Peter Cameron

“I'm fascinated by lobotomies, the idea of opening up the brain and snipping around a bit and then closing it up again, like fixing a car or something. And the person wakes up and is a little stupid but stupid in a happy, untroubled way.”

— Peter Cameron

“I'm working on a new problem: Find the value for N such that N plus everything else in your life makes you feel all right. What would N equal? Solve for N.”

— Peter Cameron

“They're both about the correct or proper way to do something. There is a correct and proper way to use words and there is a correct and proper way to behave with other people. And I behaved improperly with John and feel bad, so I compensate by obsessing with language, which is easier to control than behavior.”

— Peter Cameron

“The first night Stephen and I slept together, he whispered numbers into my ear: long, high numbers
distances between planets, seconds in a life. He spoke as if they were poetry, and they became poetry. Later, when he fell asleep, I leaned over him and watched, trying to picture a mathematician's dreams. I concluded that Stephen must dream in abstract, cool designs like Mondrian paintings.”

— Peter Cameron

Happy people make good food and fashion.

— Peter Cameron

“You're so young ... Are you sure that's what you want your life to be, forever and ever? That job? That career? That girlfriend?”

— Peter Cameron

“Io mi sento me stesso solamente quando sono solo. Il rapporto con gli altri non mi viene naturale: mi richiede uno sforzo.”

— Peter Cameron

“It made me very sad, that question. Sad and defeated. Because I knew she knew why I was thinking about that woman-I was thinking about my own tendencies toward aloneness and I thought I could end up like that woman, with a bird perhaps, or a dog-probably a dog, I know birds are supposed to make good pets but I think there's something creepy about them-but alone with a life that didn't touch or overlap with anyone else's, a sort of hermetically sealed life.”

— Peter Cameron

It is enough to remember the fact of the happiness.

— Peter Cameron

“She had insisted on keeping the doors and windows shut, as if a sealed chamber could prevent death from entering, or life from leaving her.”

— Peter Cameron

I like life. I would not want to live forever, but for a little while, life is fine.

— Peter Cameron

You're so intent on making your life impossible. It doesn't bode well. Life is difficult enough, you know.

— Peter Cameron

“Why? Because you wanted something, and tried to get it. You acted. You acted stupidly, but you acted, and that's the important part. And people often act stupidly when it comes to love. I know I
did.”

— Peter Cameron

“Isn't that what people say: it is better this way? Meaning I cannot bear it but I will. I will close my eyes and stumble forward into the darkness.”

— Peter Cameron

“The main problem was I don't like people in general and people my age in particular, and people my age are the ones who go to college.”

— Peter Cameron

“We believe in what we cannot know or understand. We do not believe in what we know.”

— Peter Cameron

It is a shame that we so quickly lose that ability to believe in things; it limits the opportunities we have to transform ourselves, to save ourselves, for it puts the awful burden of transforming and saving ourselves on ourselves. Once you stop believing, you cannot pray, or make sacrifices or pilgrimages, or light candles. You are stuck with yourself, in a world without miracles.

— Peter Cameron

American men are so embarrassed about napping," she said. "They think it is some sort of feminine indulgence. I detest a man who can't nap.

— Peter Cameron