| One of the major mistakes people make is that they think manners are only the expression of happy ideas. There's a whole wrange of behavior that can be expressed in a mannerly way. That's what civilization is all about -- doing it in a mannerly and not an antagonistic way. One of the place we went wrong was the naturalistic Rousseauean movement of the Sixties in which people said, "Why can't you just say what's on your mind?" In civilization there have to be some restraints. If we followed every impulse, we'd be killing one another ~Miss Manners (Judith Martin)"Miss Manners on Office Etiquette" Nov.6,1989, Fortune "I'm resourceful...I'm creative, I'm young, unscrupulous, highly motivated, highly skilled. IN essence what I'm saying is that society cannot afford to lose me. I'm an asset." ~p.3 April Fools Life remained a blank canvas, a cliche, a soap opera. I felt lethal, on the verge of frenzy...My mask of sanity was a victim of impending slippage.. ~p.279 Summer Everything failed to subdue me. Soon everything seemed dull: another sunrise, the lives of heroes, falling in love, war, the discoveries people made about each other. The only thing that didn't bore me, obviously enough, was how mch money Tim Price made, and yet in its obviousness it did. There wasn't a clear, identifiable emotion within me, except for greed and, possibly, total disgust. I had all the characteristics of a human being -- flesh, blood, skin, hair -- but my depersonalization was so intense, had gone so deep, that the normal ability to feel compassion had been eradicated, the victim of a slow, purposeful erasure. I was simply imitating reality, a rough resemblance of a human being, with only a dim corner of my mind functioning. Something horrible was happening and yet I couldn't figure out why -- I couldn't put my finger on it.The only thing that calmed me was the satisfying sound of ice being dropped into a glass of J&B. ~p.282 Summer ...where there was nature and earth, life and water, I saw a desert landscape that was unending, resembling some sort of crater, so devoid of reason and light and spirit that the mind could not grasp it on any sort of conscious level and if you came close the mind would reel backward, unable to take it in. It was a vision so clear and real and vital to me that in its purity it was almost abstract. This was what I could understand, this was how I lived my life, what I constructed my movement around, how I dealt with the tangible. This was the geography around which my reality revolved: it did not occur to me, ever, that people were good or that a man was capable of change or that the world could be a better place through one's taking pleasure in a feeling or a look or a gesture, of receiving another person's lover or kindness. Nothing was affirmative, the term "generosity of spirit" applied to nothing, was a cliche, was some kind of bad joke. Sex is mathematics. Individuality no longer an issue. What does intelligence signify? Define reason. Desire -- meaningless. Intellect is not a cure. Justice is dead. Fear, recrimination, innocence, sympathy, guilt, waste, failure, grief, were things, emotions, that no one really felt anymore. Reflection is useless, the world is senseless. Evil is its only permanence. God is not alive. Love cannot be trusted. Surface, surface, surface was all that anyone found meaning in...this was civilization as I saw it, collassal and jaggaed...there is an idea of Patrick Bateman, some kind of abstraction, but there is no real me, only an entity,something illusory, and though I can hide my cold gaze and you can shake my hand and feel flesh gripping yours and maybe you can even sense our lifestyles are probably comarable: I simplsy am not there. It is hard for me to make sense on any given level. Myself is fabricated, an abberation. I am a noncontingent human being. My personality is sketchy and unformed, my heartlessness goes deep and is persistent. My conscience, my pity, my hopes disappeared a long time ago (probably at Harvard) if they ever did exist. There are no more barriers to cross. All I have in common with the uncontrollable and the insane, the vicious and the evil, all the mayhem I have caused and my utter indifference toward it, I have now surpassed. I still, though, hold on to one single bleak truth: no one is safe., nothing is redeemed. Yet I am blameless. Each model of human behavior must be assumed to have some validity. Is evil something you are? Or is is something you do? My pain is constant and sharp and I do not hope for a better world for anyone. IN fact I want my pain to be inflicted on others, I want no one to escape. But even after admitting this -- and I have, countless times, in just about every act I've committed -- and coming face-to-face with these truths, there is no catharsis. I gain no deeper knowoledge about myself, no new understanding can be extracted from my telling. There has been no reason for me to tell you any of this. This confession has meant nothing... ~pp. 374 -377 End of the 1980's This is no time for the innocent. ~p.382 Aspen ...someone asks, simply, not in relations to anything, "Why?" and though I'm very proud that I have cold blood and that I can keep my nerve and do what I'm supposed to do, I catch something, then realize it: Why? and automatically answering, out o fthe blue, for no reason, just opening my mouth, words coming out, summarizing for the idiots: " Well, though I know I should have done that instead of not doing it, I'm twenty-seven for Christ sakes and this is, uh, how life presents itself in a bar or in a club in New York, maybe anywhere, at the end of the century and how people, you know, me, behave, and this is what being Patrick means to me, I guess, so, well, yup, uh..." and this is followed by a sigh, then a slight shrug and another sigh, and above oone of the doors covered by red velvet drapes in Harry's is a sign and on the sign in letters that match the drapes' color are the words THIS IS NOT AN EXIT. ~p.399 At Harry's |
| American Psycho by Bret Easton Ellis |
| Click here to go back to the quotes page |