Quotes from William Lashner

Be careful what you yearn for, because that which you desire most will either complete you or destroy you, and you don't get to choose.

Life is unbearably perverse; that which we most seek to avoid always becomes unavoidable.

Unlike the rest of you, I cheerfully admit to my own utter selfishness. I am self-made, self-absorbed, self-serving, self-referential, even self-deprecating, in a charming sort of way. In short, I am all the selfs except selfless. Yet every so often I run across a force of nature that shakes my sublime self-centeredness to its very roots. Something that tears through the landscape like a tornado, leaving nothing but ruin and reexamination in its wake.

There I sat, in the wreckage of my apartment, in the wreckage of my life – no love, no prospects, a gnawing sense of existential futility along with the certainty that a better life was being lived by everyone else

We were, all of us, prisoners of our character, unable to alter our true inner natures. When we said we had changed, what had only really changed was our luck. Put us in the same circumstances as our previous folly and suddenly we'd revert, all of us, to what we were. That's what I believed

More than anything in this world, I wish I had been born rich. It would have made up for everything. I'd still be ugly, sure, but I'd be rich and ugly. I'd still be weak and dim and tongue-tied with women, but I'd be rich enough for them not to care. I'd no longer be a social misfit, I'd be eccentric. And most of all, I'd no longer be what I was, I'd be something different.

My great fear in this life didn't have a name that I knew of. I was afraid of remaining exactly who I was, and that phobia instilled a shiver of fear into every one of my days. Something as simple as a fear of cats would have been a blessing.

You don't want to hear what I have to say. You only want me to say what you want to hear. But trust me when I tell you that you won't ever get all you want. You'll just grow frustrated and bitter, and you'll end up doing things that will kill the best part of you.

There's a place you can get to. It's hard to find and it's easy to fall out of, but there it is, that place. It is the sweetest place you've never been and it's called I Don't Give a Crap. Book yourself a ticket.

In a rich man's house there is no place to spit but in his face. —DIOGENES THE CYNIC

He rages because the people don't deserve their country and proved it by electing a racist orange glob of hair coughed up by the Russian cat.

It's all part of the bartender's creed: make them fresh, make them cold, but most of all, if they're a little overeager, make them wait.

Just then things weren't going so well in my life. My business was precariously perched on the brink of bankruptcy, my anemic love life was the stuff of a Sartre treatise – Being with Nothingness – my car could use a tune-up, my apartment could use a scrubbing, my body could use some exercise, though who would give it that was a mystery to me. I was too young to feel old, and yet there it was, the despair of middle age, hanging around my neck like a noose.

We were failures, all of us. We told him we had our reasons for the way things had turned out, but he didn't want to hear it. Told us that nothing consumed a man's soul more than the easy excuse.

Class divisions as clear as those between Harrington and myself always bring out my best, or at least my most petty.

The thing I love about a blue drink is that it isn't pretending to be anything other than a prissy, made-up concoction for people who can't drink their whiskey straight. A cocktail with the courage of its lack of conviction.

Sometimes you only saw yourself clearly in the eyes of those you've left, and what you saw was a horror.

Instead he lifted up his head and turned his neck so he could catch sight of the man just as he reached the back of the house—a darkly clothed figure with short legs and broad shoulders, his wide back hunched and powerful, running quite quickly despite a slight limp, ripping open the door with massive arms, tearing out into the light, glancing back with a quick twist of his huge neck before jumping like a cheetah over the fence.

Here's to being single, drinking doubles, and seeing triple.

there is nothing so brittle as someone else's perfection.

Do you do yoga?" she said. "No, but I bend over sometimes to pick up a beer.

Whatever they had together, it was collapsing under its own weight. He could see the signs. Her dissatisfaction was showing, like a slip beneath the hem of a crisply pleated skirt, and it ruined the whole effect.

The campus was Disney-fascist, a relentlessly upbeat place to wither and die.

Now Violet had let herself go until she could barely make it out of the house to buy her Oreos and booze. But if you looked closely, beneath the folds of flesh ravaged by bitterness and drink, you could see the lovely creature she had been, and what she had been then was just as bitter and vindictive as what she was now.