Steve Toltz

It's always something here - if there isn't a riot, then someone's usually trying to escape. The wasted effort helps me see the positives of imprisonment. Unlike those pulling their hair out in good society, here we don't have to feel ashamed of our day-to-day unhappiness. Here we have someone visible to blame - someone wearing shiny boots. That's why, on consideration, freedom leaves me cold. Because out there in the real world, freedom means you have to admit authorship, even when your story turns out to be a real stinker.

With medical science improving at roughly the same rate as our environmental situation worsens, the most likely scenario is that the world will become uninhabitable at the precise moment the human race becomes immortal.

The past is truly an inoperable tumour that spreads to the present.

When we finished the kiss she said laughing, I can taste your loneliness - it tastes like vinegar. That annoyed me. Everyone knows loneliness tastes like cold potato soup.

After all, memory may be the only thing on earth we can truly manipulate to serve us, so we don't have to look back at ourselves in the receding past and think, What an arsehole!

Amen' is like the Send button on an email.

...I wondered if it was blasphemous to tell God that rainbows are kitsch.

Are you listening, Jasper? Sometimes you'll be walking in the city late at night, and a woman walking in front of you will spin her head around and then cross the street simply because some members of your gender rape women and molest children!

Sometimes they [people] throw off their freedom so quickly, you'd think it was burning them.

The moment seemed endless, but it was probably only half that.

_ she gave me a look that deftly combined tenderness with revulsion. To this day the memory of that look still visits me like a Jehovah__ Witness: uninvited and tireless.

Regrets came up and asked me if I__ like to own them. Declined them for the most part but took a few just so I wouldn__ leave this relationship empty handed.

Sometimes not talking is effortless, and other times it__ more exhausting than lifting pianos.

Sometimes I think the human animal doesn't really need food or water to survive, only gossip.

We just didn't get it. We were weakened and exhilarated at the same time. A paranoiac's nightmare! A narcissist's dream! We didn't know how to feel: flattered or raped. Maybe both. We were puzzling at breakneck speed.

There__ nothing wonderful or interesting about unrequited love. I think it__ shitty, just plain shitty. To love someone who doesn__ return your affections might be exciting in books, but in life it__ unbearably boring. I__l tell you what__ exciting: sweaty, passionate nights. But sitting on the veranda outside the home of a sleeping woman who isn__ dreaming about you is slow moving and just plain sad.

To my horror principles have wormed their way into [the] fabric of my being.

I believe that a person's thoughts often manifest into actual events - that we think things into existence. Right? Well, think about this: one of the illnesses that has become an epidemic in the Western world is an addiction to news. Newspapers, Internet news, 24-hour news channels. And what is news? News is history in the making. So the addiction to news is the addiction to the outcome of history. Are you with me so far?''I get it. Go on.''In the past couple of decades, news has been produced as entertainment. So people's addiction to news is the addiction to its function as entertainment. If you combine the power of thought with this addiction to entertaining news, then the part of the hundreds of millions of people, the viewing public, that wishes peace on earth is overshadowed by the part of them that wants the next chapter in the story. Every person who turns on the news and finds there's no developments is disappointed. They're checking the news two or three times a day - they want drama, and drama means not only death but death by the thousands, so in the secrets parts of themselves, every news-addicted person is hoping for greater calamity, more bodies, more spectacular wars, more hideous enemy attacks, and these wishes are going out every day into the world. Don't you see? Right now, more than at any other time in history, the universal wish is a black one.