Quotessence
Home / Quotes / Quote by Alan Kapelner

Quote by Alan Kapelner

“A stucco of agony clothed her mind when she thought of having to go home to see her mother, a frail compound of maudlin substance. Someone shut the warm faucet in her body and she quaked in the wind. A man on his motorcycle tooted his horn and she heard a boy call his father a jerk.”

Quote by Alan Kapelner

Book:Lonely Boy Blues
Create image

Work

Lonely Boy Blues

Browse quotes and source details for this work. more

Author

Alan Kapelner

Browse famous quotes and profile details for Alan Kapelner. more

You May Also Like

“He yawned, his face performing that universal mixture of a smile and a frown as he stretched his arms out. One was not sure why faces did this—either waking people were activating their muscles in preparation for the day or more soulfully, the smile was gratitude for life and the frown to follow was recognition of what that life entailed.”

LifeSadnessLonelinessHuman ConditionGetting OldSleepingYawningA Happy Ghost
Book:A Happy Ghost
Create image

“Andrei was in an elusive period in life, much like a snow leopard. He’d spent a couple of years having successfully filtered out all that was terrible and ugly in his life, from old shoes to lifeless people. However, the purification finished and he had not yet found the glint of gold to replace the damned. He had nowhere to place his lifted foot. Instead, his moral foot hovered, awkwardly, a crepuscular flesh, trembling every night, unable to set itself in a correct place. He lived in that hanging imbalance every day, and some would say this period of searching takes a while. But to him, all it did was take. Not a while. The peace of his life just takes. And takes. And takes. While Andrei may not suffer from the heat of stress or common negativity that improperly placed feet do, he lived cold, in a void, without the luxury of finding a worthy arrangement for his leopard paw.”

SuccessGrowing UpSadnessSocietyLonelinessIdentityBoredomAdulthoodFriendshipsToxicity
Book:A Happy Ghost
Create image

“Pornography did not serve him either. Andrei used to have his personal kinks and fetishes, but after a while, nothing could get him off. For a long time, the only videos he would search were the ones titled: “Who is she?” The only thing that vitalized his self-play was the prospect of some woman on the earth no one knew of and could not find. There was something infinite to these tapes, not the appearance of the girls, but the agitating dissatisfaction and momentary access of a not-so-innocent stranger who men innocently lost forever. It consisted of poorly recorded videos, posted from a smartphone or webcam, and a desperate number of melancholy comments trying to search for the mystery woman. There were plenty of these recordings. But it broke Andrei even more when eventually he knew all the girls no one knew.”

SadnessLonelinessSolitudeAddictionMasculinityPornographyMasturbationPornThe InternetPorn Addiction
Book:A Happy Ghost
Create image

“He did not want to write a book about it. He’d tried once, attempting a novel, even some poems, but they broke his heart and he could not bring himself to art anymore. 'So the only way to end this painful curiosity is to transfer it to someone else? To fictionalize it? To talk about it and still live the same problem tomorrow? To appear as if you’ve beaten it just because you can identify the problem?' He would sob in museums, where he sought refuge but escaped in horror. 'Fuck that—art’s not an answer to life, it’s a disguise.”

ArtLyingPoetrySadnessSocietyBooksWritersArtistsNovelsDisguises
Book:A Happy Ghost
Create image