David Burr Gerrard

“Thinking, like other drugs, can be a useful distraction from pain, as long as it's managed and doesn't become an addiction.”

“One way to think about your life is as an extended free fall. An epiphany may help you see better as you fall. Rather than a meaningless blur, you will see rocks and trees and lizards. An epiphany is not a parachute.”

“The problem with freedom is that when people have it, they do what they want to.”

“All nineteen-year-old males are children who are men capable of war.”

“The things white men failed to notice would fill the world they had ruined ten thousand times over.”

“Don’t you wonder sometimes,” Miranda asked, “whether women have all the power or no power at all?”

“The epiphany machine will not discover anything about you that you do not, in some way, already know. But think for a moment about surprise. What is surprising is never what is revealed but the grace with which it has been hidden.”

“That’s what nobody admits about men, how needy they are.”

“Christianity has always been the Gestapo of desire, since long, long before there was a Gestapo. Instead of Jews to hate, Christianity has desire. Though I guess Christianity has Jews, too. In any case, all the ovens in the world can’t incinerate desire.”

“Men do everything that men do, from waging war to reading books, for one purpose only: to get laid.”

“You already know what the machine will write on your arm. That lie you’ve been telling yourself—you know what it is. That blind spot is not really a blind spot—you’re choosing to look away. Perhaps more to the point, you already know whether you want to see it. You already know whether you’re going to use the machine. So why are you still reading this?”

“He says that politics is a waste of time. Politics are? Politics is? Anyway, a waste of time. He says you should focus on your own sexual gratification.”

“It’s something of a cliché, at least among war correspondents, that war makes people unusually horny; what it actually does is make you want to touch as much flesh as you can get your hands on.”