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Alexander Masters Quotes

I don't know, Alexander, sometimes it gets so bad you can't think of nothing better to do than make it worse.

I don't know, Alexander, sometimes it gets so bad you can't think of nothing better to do than make it worse.

Alexander Masters
Thinking, Sometimes, Knows
Alexander Masters (2006). “Stuart: A Life Backwards”, Random House Digital, Inc.

And so on, until you arrive at the other side, among the purely abstract self-harming: the grinding over your failures, the refusal to remember anything good, the determination to ensure - if anyone falls into the mistake of making it clear they actually like you - that the next time round they change their opinion pronto. Emotional self-cannibalism, in other words, like those tessellated pictures of a person grappling with a mirror image of himself.

Alexander Masters
Determination, Mistake, Fall
Alexander Masters (2006). “Stuart: A Life Backwards”, Random House Digital, Inc.

It's a question I often ask myself: what would I do with me? And I don't know the answer. I don't know what I'd do, except run away.

Alexander Masters
Running, Answers, Knows

For a moment, I believe, there was a stillness. A shocking realization by all things - beetles, dormice, the spiders spinning their webs in the moonlight, even the hot metal of the tracks and the wind in the trees - that Death had just shrieked past like a stinking black eagle and made off with a remarkable man.

Alexander Masters
Believe, Past, Men
Alexander Masters (2006). “Stuart: A Life Backwards”, Random House Digital, Inc.

Twenty miles on, we have spotted a roadside sign: 'CHAINSAW CARVED MUSHROOMS'. Troubles promptly forgotten, Stuart falls to gawping at the road ahead. What could it all be about? 'As one victim to another,' his body language seems to marvel, 'What's a mushroom done to deserve that kind of abuse?' Not even in the worst days of street-fighting did he ever experience ill-treatment on this scale.

Alexander Masters
Fall, Fighting, Mushrooms
Alexander Masters (2006). “Stuart: A Life Backwards”, Random House Digital, Inc.

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