Explore Quotes by Joshua Ferris

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.

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.

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

A child, thought Carl, is not the only result of childbirth. A mother, too, is born. You see them every day--nondescript women with a bulge just above the groin, slightly double-chinned. Perpetually forty. Someone's mother, you think. There is a child somewhere who has made this woman into a mother, and for the sake of the child she has altered her appearance to better play the part.

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.

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?

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.

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.

She looks at herself in the mirror. The idea is to look sexy again. And for whom exactly? Yourself, of course. Yes, well, that's all wonderfully self-affirming and very strong-minded as any decent woman should be these days, but let's just face facts here and say that when a woman - no, when a person is thinking about feeling sexy, it is always with the idea of someone else in mind.

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

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.