Joshua Ferris Quotes

#1. A multifaceted writer, very easy on the surface to pin down but incredibly difficult once you actually read him with any depth.

Joshua Ferris

#2. I swore never to use the emoticon ever ... until one day, offhandedly and without much thought, I used my first and, shortly thereafter, in spite of my initial resistance, became a regular staple of my daily correspondence

Joshua Ferris

#3. The connected get more connected while the disconnected get more disconnected.

Joshua Ferris

#4. Her internalization of Catholicism and its institutional disappointments suited a dental office perfectly, where guilt was often our last resort for motivating the masses.

Joshua Ferris

#5. I think we're losing sight of what our ultimate goal is here, said Genevieve. But we feared that if she was washed out, people would look right past the flyer.

Joshua Ferris

#6. The main questions of everyday life are too enormous to answer in any definitive sense.

Joshua Ferris

#7. We had visceral, rich memories of dull, interminable hours. Then a day would pass in perfect harmony with our projects, our family members, and our coworkers, and we couldn't believe we were getting paid for this.

Joshua Ferris

#8. We had the great good fortune and shortcomings of character that marked every generation that had never seen war.

Joshua Ferris

#9. Freedom of religion in America is all fine and good until you start believing in nothing, and then it is a crime to be punished.' " "Is

Joshua Ferris

#10. If you hate the Yankees so much," Connie asked me, "why did you move to New York?" "To find out what kind of city could make a monster like a Yankees fan.

Joshua Ferris

#11. After I left college I thought, very naively, that either you became someone interesting - an artist - or you went into academia. If you ended up in an office you were dull and lacking. And I ended up in an office.

Joshua Ferris

#12. It is forgivable to say nothing out of ignorance; it's inexcusable to remain silent once awareness dawns.

Joshua Ferris

#13. Some days felt longer than other days. Some days felt like two whole days. Unfortunately those days were never weekend days. Our Saturdays and Sundays passed in half the time of a normal workday. In other words, some weeks it felt like we worked ten straight days and had only one day off.

Joshua Ferris

#14. The office is a romantic enabler because you're always around the person you have a crush on. There's no escape from, and maybe no desire to escape from, those pressure-cooker conditions. And there's an automatic series of things you have to talk about all the time.

Joshua Ferris

#15. I listened to Karen Woo give an explaination of photosynthesis once," he said. "God only knows why they were discussing photosynthesis.They hung on her every word, like she was a PBS special. Her explaination didn't even involve sunlight. These people will believe anything. They will say anything.

Joshua Ferris

#16. Everything was always something, but something - and here was the rub - could never be everything.

Joshua Ferris

#17. But I did like looking at her. It was harder now, knowing all the ways she sucked, but she was still gorgeous.

Joshua Ferris

#18. We had these sudden revelations that employment, the daily nine-to-five, was driving us far from our better selves.

Joshua Ferris

#19. I think it's a very bad idea for someone to start writing for a readership.

Joshua Ferris

#20. I would really like that, Betsy, to cheer and jeer and hoot and root alongside a band of brothers. I would love that. But do you have any idea how much attention you have to pay to a Red Sox game? Even a regular-season Red Sox game?

Joshua Ferris

#21. I have never stopped considering not becoming a writer.

Joshua Ferris

#22. I know what to do with my life. I just don't know what to do with this one night.

Joshua Ferris

#23. One thing we knew for certain- despite all our certainties, it was very difficult to guess what one individual was thinking at any given moment.

Joshua Ferris

#24. Every time you hear someone read your book and liked your book, you're never sure whether that's going to follow with a similar remark from someone else. Perhaps I have low expectations, but whenever I hear someone say, 'I liked your book,' I don't know if it's going to happen again.

Joshua Ferris

#25. But now, now he needed to let himself rest when it came time to rest, and to move on when it came time to move on, and to do so in the direction of the moving on.

Joshua Ferris

#26. I never did anything on game night, even though I recorded the games and could always watch them later, because those nights were sacrosanct, and if I gave up the one sacrosanct thing, where would I be and what would I have?

Joshua Ferris

#27. We told him to get on with it. We liked wasting time, but almost nothing was more annoying than having our wasted time wasted on something not worth wasting it on.

Joshua Ferris

#28. After Connie and I broke up, I played a little game with myself out on the streets of Manhattan. It was called Things Could Be Worse. Things could be worse, I said to myself, I could be that guy.

Joshua Ferris

#29. We'd seen firsthand how the man handled a crisis. If Marcia decided suddenly to brandish a stapler in a half-threatening manner, he'd fumble with his Motorola and forget his name.

Joshua Ferris

#30. I wished it had turned out differently. I wished I had been better all around. I wished above all that when I believed something, like that I was finally over her, that I knew myself even the slightest bit.

Joshua Ferris

#31. If in large part we were concerned only with making it through another day without getting laid off, there was a smaller part just hoping to leave for the night without contributing to someone's lifetime of hurt.

Joshua Ferris

#32. Because of God, even the imperious ballbreakers, moralizing windbags, and meddling assholes may know love.

Joshua Ferris

#33. We suffered failures of imagination just like everyone else, our daring was wanting, and our daily contentment too nearly adequate for us to give it up.

Joshua Ferris

#34. I content myself with the fact that the general system of our trade is a system of selfishness, is not dictated by the high sentiments of human nature much less by the sentiments of love and heroism but is a system of distrust not of giving, but of taking advantage.

Joshua Ferris

#35. If you can get by with quotes from The Godfather and nothing you say matters, that's pretty bleak, don't you think? Don't we want what we say to matter?

Joshua Ferris

#36. We were fractious and overpaid. Our mornings lacked promise. At least those of us who smoked had something to look forward to at ten-fifteen.

Joshua Ferris

#37. For all our penny-wisdom,'" he said, "'for all our soul-destroying slavery to habit, it is not to be doubted that all men have sublime thoughts.

Joshua Ferris

#38. She had the conviction of the newly converted, which wouldn't last forever, but would for the moment brook no discouragement or allow for second-guessing.

Joshua Ferris

#39. All broken hearts are circumstantial. Every lovelorn jerk is the victim of bad timing, good intentions, and someone else's poor decision making.

Joshua Ferris

#40. He stood just inside the door and took stock. Everything in it had been taken for granted. How had that happened again? He had promised himself not to take anything for granted and now he couldn't recall the moment that promise had given way to the everyday. It was not likely one single moment.

Joshua Ferris

#41. Without monstrous distortions, I was slowly learning, without lies and hypocrisy, one cannot have the idealized American life I so longed for. Perfection was marred only by those corruptions necessary to its enterprise.

Joshua Ferris

#42. We had any number of clocks surrounding us, and every one of them at one time or another exhibited a lively sense of humor.

Joshua Ferris

#43. To conform is to lose your soul

Joshua Ferris

#44. Aren't you capable of finding anything beautiful in the world?" I'd tell her, she'd say, "I do not want to know about those websites. Please keep those disgusting websites to yourself.

Joshua Ferris

#45. The funny thing about work itself, it was so bearable. The dreariest task was perfectly bearable. It presented challenges to overcome, the distraction provided by a sense of urgency, and the things made work utterly, even harmoniously bearable.

Joshua Ferris

#46. Things Could Be Worse And Things Could Be So Much Better - that became the game, my running commentary on the streets of Manhattan, and I played it as well as the other slobs just trying to get by.

Joshua Ferris

#47. We found ourselves wanting to hurry time along, which was not in the long run good for our health. Everybody was trapped in this contradiction but nobody ever dared to articulate it.

Joshua Ferris

#48. A dentist is only half the doctor he claims to be,

Joshua Ferris

#49. It was uncertain. She was in her early forties. Breast cancer. No one could identify exactly how everyone had come to know this fact. Was it a fact? Some people called it rumor. But in fact there was no such thing as rumor. There was fact, and there was what did not come up in conversation.

Joshua Ferris

#50. So for the sake of your identity," she said, "you avoided using your real name, which effectively allowed someone else to use your real name and steal your identity.

Joshua Ferris

#51. Night of limitless possibility expired, of a life forfeited, of a foreclosed

Joshua Ferris

#52. For a long time thereafter I stared almost steadily at the bright and ostentatious VERIZON sign on top of one of the tallest buildings - the only branded skyscraper in Manhattan, a fucking blight marring the skyline - and I thought, Why couldn't those cunts have flown into that building?

Joshua Ferris

#53. They were like two inviolable spheres touching at a fine point in their curves, touching but failing to penetrate, failing to breathe the other's air.

Joshua Ferris

#54. Without work, so much of one's identity just evaporates.

Joshua Ferris

#55. I've always thought things were absurd. It would take a lot more effort for me to see things as reasonable.

Joshua Ferris

#56. I had never thought much of genealogy. A lot of wasted time collecting the names of the dead. Then stringing those names, like skulls upon a wire, into an entirely private and thus irrelevant narrative, lacking any historical significance. The narcissistic pastime of nostalgic bores.

Joshua Ferris

#57. It is really irritating to work with irritating people

Joshua Ferris

#58. Once again it occurred to me that so many of the things I could do in New York involved eating and drinking. Had we been placed here on earth to do nothing more than eat and drink?

Joshua Ferris

#59. Everyone desires relationships and community. Most people want to belong to a cohesive, like-minded group. It staves off loneliness. It promotes identity. These are natural and very human instincts.

Joshua Ferris

#60. I don't write directly on to the computer because I don't think well facing forward with fingers on a keyboard. I think better looking down holding a pen. And the concentration quotient of pen and paper is higher than when I'm moving words around on screen.

Joshua Ferris

#61. Of course I alienate myself from society. It's the only way I know of not being constantly reminded of all the ways I'm alienated from society.

Joshua Ferris

#62. This is really what you want? To live with a poet?" "Yes," she said. "With the hot plate? And the lice?

Joshua Ferris

#63. We loved killing time and had perfected several ways of doing so. We wandered the hallways carrying papers that indicated some mission of business when in reality we were in search of free candy.

Joshua Ferris

#64. We all knew there was a good deal of pointlessness to nearly all the meetings and in fact one meeting out of every three or four was nearly perfectly without gain or purpose but many meetings revealed the one thing that was necessary and so we attended them and afterward we thanked each other.

Joshua Ferris

#65. People have all this resentment against their parents for fucking them up, but they never realize, the minute they have a kid, that they cease being the child so fondly victimized in their hearts and start being the benighted perpetrators of unfathomable pain.

Joshua Ferris

#66. Some people would never forget certain people, a few people would remember everyone, and most of us would mostly be forgotten.

Joshua Ferris

#67. Our moral foundation is built on the fundamental law that God (if there is a God, which there is not) would not wish to be worshipped in the perverted and misconceived ways of human beings, with their righteous violence and prejudices and hypocrisies. Doubt, or cease being moral.

Joshua Ferris

#68. My first job is to write a book that I believe is compelling and deserves the long sustained attention that any novel requires, and to worry about the commerce only late in the game.

Joshua Ferris

#69. One thing that I discovered about myself is I really don't like traveling. I feel like it's a terrible personal failing, but I was so satisfied to arrive at the conclusion.

Joshua Ferris

#70. I come from a very illustrious line of divorces. We love to get divorced in my family. My mother and father have been married four times each - eight ceremonies with the best of intentions.

Joshua Ferris

#71. What separated the living from one another could be as impenetrable as whatever barrier separated the living from the dead.

Joshua Ferris