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'.”

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

“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.”

“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.”

“Having bad experiences sometimes helps; it makes it clearer what it is youshould be doing. I know that sounds very Pollyannaish but it’s true. People who have had 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 mustn’t let them defeat you. You must see them as a gift—a cruel gift, but a gift nonetheless.”

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

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