Context is for Babies - A Look at Lines Deprived of their Natural Home

Here are some scenes and lines from my new book, offered up without any context whatsoever:

“I will tell you this story. It is a story of memory and friends fading
and fears falling away and things unexpected on all sides. It is a story
made of memory, about memory. I remember it as clearly as I see myself
in dark glass. I will give you this story, if this is what you want.
“I do not know if it is a good story, but it is the only story I know.”

-The Old Man, 'The Nailgun'

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“If your story is, as I suspect, a piece of ignorant shit made by a cubicle rat so fucking depressed about his miserable failure of a life that he has to pretend he is something more than he will ever be – well then I will blow your head off your fucking neck and laugh as the spray of blood coats my face, and then I will jam this gun in Calvin’s neck and spray his
jugular all over your corpse.
“It’s like my Jackson Pollock phase, capiche?”
-Mickey-D, 'Brilliant Story'

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Clarence asked, with genuine interest, about the paperback Rick
had on his lap.

“Oh, I don’t really read it. I have had this same book on the bus
for about two months. I read maybe a page a day. You see a lot of us
types of readers on the bus, but I’m the only one who admits it.” He
grinned as he spoke. Clarence smiled back, astonished at this unusual
display of honesty.

“The book in my hands is just a prop to make me feel like I don’t
spend two hours of every day staring out of a window at the same
buildings and streets sliding past. Through the intellectual process of
opening the book, frowning down at it, then closing it with my thumb to
keep my place, while sighing loudly as I stare out the window, I feel much
more productive, intelligent, and above all: superior.”

-Little Red Rick, 'Brilliant Story'

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"I had to do something, so I did something stupid."

-Jimmy Boy, 'Scheme'

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None of them suspected his perfectly legal and completely addictive
habit – they just thought he was a barely tolerable person with an
amusing (often irritating) personality.

-said of Stan, 'The Nailgun'

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As his eyes followed its ghostly, gravity-guided wafting, he saw
something trickling across the shiny surface of his neighbor’s lonely
loafers that caused him to drop the crumpled wad of bathroom tissue
that he had been gripping in his left hand. A thin rivulet of blood slid
down the gleaming brown surface of the shoe like an adventuring ant that
had wandered too far from its colony. The red of the stuff looked sickly on
the brown of the shoes; it was like stabbing a fork into undercooked meat
and seeing the whore’s-lipstick red of the animal’s lifeblood oozing out
from the unspeakable cracks in the threaded mass of its too-raw carcass.

-Blood Coming at Rodger, 'Courtesy Flush'

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The stupidest thing you've ever done is not buy seventy copies of my book.

-Me, 'True Stuff'