It took me a while to enjoy this book. There were only a few of the short stories that I actually enjoyed and it took me until the last 10 pages or so to really enjoy the novella, Westward the Course of Empire Takes Its Way.

Little Expressionless Animals

  • “animals faces have no expression… A man’s face has nothing on it.” [p 41]

Girl With Curious Hair

  • “… how glad I was that I had gotten to be friends with such find and fun persons! They are very unique and different from my past friends whom I had growing up in Alexandria, Virginia and attending fine schools and universities such as the Westminster Military Academy, Brown University, the Wharton School of Business at the University of Pennsylvania, and the Law School at the University at Yale. All my past friends have real names and wear clothes similar to mine.” [p 60]
  • “Los Angeles Young Republicans” [p 61]
  • “serving as the carrier of the Black Boc of nuclear codes for the President” [p 62]
  • “my white experiencs and emotions” [p 67]
  • “I was a Sick Puppy who already had everything, thus he wished to inquire as to why I traded my big everything for a big nothing.” [p 68]
  • “I claimed that that was a riot of amusement: a punkrocker with ammunition such as Cheese being freightened of a dapper and handsome civilian like Sick Puppy” [p 70]

Here and There

  • “reader, as well as object?” [p 153]
  • “Words as fulfillers of the function of signification in artistic communication will wither like the rules of form before them. Meaning will be clean…” [p 155]
  • “Then say that art necessarily exists in a state of tension with its own standards.” [p 155]
  • “… becomes another here instead of a there.” [p 164]
  • “… think about how boring it would be to be perfect.” [p 166]

My Appearance

  • sell out
  • “I didn’t want to be made to look as though I’d prostituted my name and face and talents to a meat company.” [p 183]
  • Commercials of the parodies of the commercials

Say Never

  • “I will wait for something to wait for.” [p 224]
  • Face it; don’t avoid it indefinitely.

Westward the Course of Empire Takes Its Way

  • “Look-Mom-no-hands quality” [p 234]
  • “those painfully radiant types whose apparent blindness to their own radiance only makes the sting of the light meaner.” [p 235]
  • “Admen do this. Bet their life on criticism, attention, desire, fear, love, marriage of concession and market. Retention of image. Loyalty to brand. Empathy with client. Sales. On life. Life.” [p 240]
  • “Does a Funhouse need to be more than Fun?” [p 242]
  • “Central Illinois is, by no imaginer’s stretch, a Funhouse” [p 242]
  • “in about the 1960’s, is that they tend to live too intensely inside their own social moment, and thus tend to see all existence past age thirty or so as somehow postcoital.” [p 264]
  • “no-handsism”, “metafiction” [p 265]
  • “Reunion to end all reunions.” [p 267]
  • “the preceding generation of crippingly self-conscious writers, obsessed with their own interpretation” [p 269]
  • “We just want to do the bare unavoidable minimum. Pay taxes, die.” [p 269]
  • “anybody who’ll take money from a stranger, in an airport, for free, with no idea of who we are or what if any scam is at work, who’ll reveal his number-one fear and desire to a clipboard, for money, is a born consumer” [p 284]
  • “This is the main, this is the legendary man, I’m sure you two know, who eventually got Arm and Hammer baking soda customers to start pouring the stuff down the drain. As … get this … drain freshener!” [p 285]
  • “Drain odor?…It’s just fear.” [p 285]
  • “your arrow, at full draw, is somewhere between three and nine centimeters to the left of the true straight line to the bull’s-eye” [p 293]
  • “The car itself looked like a car for neither adults nor children. It was a huge, ageless, jacked-up, malevolent sports car” [p 297]
  • “I built this baby from scratch. It’s not technically an anything. It’s a me if it’s anything.” [p 298]
  • “TV about bodies politic and people with dying bodies or robbers and cops puncturing bodies or doctors resealing bodies. Novels about novelists writing novels about novelists, who never succumb.” [p 309]
  • “Advertising will have finally arrived at the death that’s been its object all along. And in Death, it will of course become Life.” [p 310]
  • “Credit cards aren’t toys.” [p 315]
  • “Credit is political… It’s a tool of the elite. You use credit without thinking, you’re unthinkingly endorsing a status quo.” [p 316]
  • “Politics is everywhere. Except thank God in stuff like popular culture. That’s why entertainment’s so important… It is pretty much the only escape.” [p 317]
  • “Pure entertainment” [p 317]
  • “Especially in reruns…Incredibly comforting. You know just how the universe is going to be for the next hour. Totally secure. Detached but connected. A womb with a view.” [p 317]
  • You’re paying to go to school to write and you don’t write anything? … I’m not terribly prolific… These things happen in programs. That’s why I’ve decided I detest all… You’re blocked? … Probably a standards problem… I get a creative type under me who’s blocked, it always in the end turns out to be just a problem of unrealistic standards." [p 327]
  • “That art-school crap’s bogus, man… Only bullshit artists move in packs.” [p 327]
  • Stories are like marriages. “A story ought to lead you to bed with both hands.” [p 330]
  • “Ambrose’s famous metafictional story, ‘Lost in the Funhouse’” [p 331]
  • “Mark has always been so troubled by the story, and by Ambrose’s willingness now to franchise his art into a new third dimension — to build ‘real’ Funhouses.” [p 331]
    • sell out
  • “backwards: they want to build a Funhouse for lovers out of a story that does not love.” [p 331]
  • “A story, just maybe, should treat the reader like it wants to… well, fuck him.” [p 331]
  • “‘selling out; is fundamentally redundant.” [p 333]
  • “You think an ad’s just a piece of art?… You think it’s not about what life’s really about? That your fear and desires grow on trees? Come out of nowhere?” [p 338]
  • “dividing this fiction business into realistic and naturalistic and surrealistic and modern and postmodern and new-realistic and meta- is like dividing history into cosmic and tragic and prophetic and apocalyptic; is like dividing human beings into white and black and brown and yellow and orange. It atomizes, does not bind crowds, and, like everything timelessly dumb, leads to blind hatred, blind loyalty, blind supplication.” [p 346]
  • “if you’re going to classify everything, you might at least divide by the knife of what is desired. of where in the sky to look for the nothing-new sun. Divide from inside. Homiletic fiction desires peace. Eleemosynary fiction desires charity. Iconodulistic fiction desires order. Prurient fiction desires desire. Apocalyptic fiction desires the invevitable change it hides behind fearing.” [p 347]
  • “What you’re scared of has always been what moved you.” [p 349]
  • “That what unlocks you, event today, is what you want to want. In what you value. And what you value’s married to those certain things you just won’t do… whether you’re free or locked up depends, all and only, on what you want. What you have matters about as much as the color of your sky. Or your bars.” [p 349]
  • “we already ache with desire for what we fear.” [p 349]
  • “Everybody who really wants to knows what’s true. Most people just don’t want to. It means listening from deep inside. Most people just don’t want to.” [p 351]
  • Listen to you. The you you want to be.
  • “alone fun” [p 354]
  • Life in prison for counterfeiting. Symbolizing the trap of not thinking for yourself. [p 364]
  • “Don’t all, facing Life, given the chance, flee?” [p 365]
  • “I will not rat. And you cannot make me. I’ve got Life, coming.” [p 365]
  • “The adult world, in Dave’s opinion, has turned out to be a basically shifty, shitty place. It’s risky and often sad and always wildly insecure. It beats him over the head… He knows, now, that nearly everything you call Yours in this world can be taken away from you by other people, assuming they want it enough….They can’t take your honor. Only that can be given.” [p 368-369]
  • Life is the Funhouse.