Ron Currie Jr. famous quotes

03-22-2025

Everything ends, and Everything matters. Everything matters not in spite of the end of you and all that you love, but because of it. Everything is all you’ve got…and after Everything is nothing. So you were wise to welcome Everything, the good and the bad alike, and cling to it all. Gather it in. Seek the meaning in sorrow and don’t ever turn away, not once, from here until the end. Because it is all the same, it is all unfathomable, and it is all infinitely preferable to the one dreadful alternative.
-- Ron Currie Jr.

#Wise #Sorrow #Alternatives
And knowing that the only alternative to your grief is the nothingness that’s fast approaching, you try to embrace your own sorrow, to be open and empty and let it all pass through you. This is the key, you have learned – to relinquish control, to relinquish the desire for control. Even in this late drama, to try to control is to go mad. And so you do your best to let it all go.
-- Ron Currie Jr.

#Drama #Grief #Keys
You wish they understood, as you do, that there is no escape and never was, that from the moment two cells combined to become one they were doomed. You wish they understood that there is joy in this fact, greater joy and love in just this one last moment than they experienced in the entirety of their lives. Because even in this last moment there is still Everything, whole galaxies and eons, the sum total of every experience across time, shrunk to the head of a pin, theirs for the asking, right here, right now. And so anything, anything, anything is possible.
-- Ron Currie Jr.

#Cells #Two #Joy
My sense of humor tends toward both the dark and the absurd - two great tastes that, in my opinion, taste great together.
-- Ron Currie Jr.

#Dark #Two #Together
And when you try to live there, to live in a place where you're betraying yourself over and over, not only do you grow to resent the hell out of it, and resent the hell out of whomever you're betraying and censoring yourself for, but the very idea of your self begins slowly and inexorably to erode. Until you realize one day out of the clear blue that you have no idea who your self is, anymore.
-- Ron Currie Jr.

#Blue #Self #Ideas
Jay Wexler is my kind of writer--a weird one, and a wry one, and one who isnt afraid to act silly in a sort of bait-and-switch that, to the readers surprise, moves him as much as it makes him laugh. Like all the best comedians, Wexler is clearly nursing a heart that the world broke a long time ago. Ed Tuttle is a book that cant decide what it wants to be when it grows up, but as with most cases of arrested development, theres something very serious going on behind all the antics. Plus, there are pictures.
-- Ron Currie Jr.

#Growing Up #Silly #Moving
All of which raises the question – your task, burden, privilege, call it what you like – a question which men and women, great and not-so of every color, creed and sexual persuasion have asked since they first had the language to do so, and probably before: Does Anything I Do Matter?
-- Ron Currie Jr.

#Men #Color #Doe
I know well what faith really means to people in their daily lives, as there are many people in my family whose lives are permeated by their faith: it dictates the way they behave and sustains them in tough times, of which we've had too many lately.
-- Ron Currie Jr.

#Mean #People #Tough Times
Don't repackage your fear and try to sell it to me as indifference.
-- Ron Currie Jr.

#Trying #Indifference #Sells
You could not be more correct. It does matter. All of it.
-- Ron Currie Jr.

#Doe #Matter
Your life has more blue in it than a James Cameron movie.
-- Ron Currie Jr.

#Blue #Cameron
I'm definitely excited by big ideas, both in what I write and what I read. Most days, reality is so mind-numbingly dull that I don't understand why someone would write strictly realistic stories, given the almost limitless freedom fiction provides. I don't see the point of making believe if you're not going to actually make believe: hang your ass out in the wind, push at every boundary, make almost unreasonable demands on your reader's willingness to suspend disbelief. This is dangerous, and prone to failure, but that's part of what makes it fun.
-- Ron Currie Jr.

#Fun #Believe #Writing
Partying means drinking. It also means playing records by Lou Reed and Chicago, which I thought was a city but is also a band it turns out.
-- Ron Currie Jr.

#Party #Drinking #Mean
The urge to move is natural and understandable. As will be the case throughout your life, no matter how long or brief, the choice is, in the end, yours. Simply bear in mind that most every choice will have consequences, and in this instance those consequences would likely be quite grave.
-- Ron Currie Jr.

#Moving #Long #Choices
Love, in its purest form, is biology.
-- Ron Currie Jr.

#Biology #Form
I am not your God. Or if I am, I'm no God you can seek out for deliverance or explanation. I'm the kind of God who would eat you without compunction if I were hungry.
-- Ron Currie Jr.

#Deliverance #Kind #Hungry
But the thing is, from the perspective of a novelist there is a brand of lying that feels more honest than the actual facts of an event. Lying as a way to move closer to the truth, or to illuminate ow something actually feels in a way the mere facts cannot.
-- Ron Currie Jr.

#Lying #Moving #Perspective
A lot of the despair we feel watching the news every day flows from our sense of helplessness, and as a fiction writer you get to control things, if only on the page. You get to run the show. You can right wrongs, bring departed loved ones back to life, even take vengeance on God, if that's your thing.
-- Ron Currie Jr.

#Running #Departed #Despair
Whenever someone asks me craft questions like that I feel like I can give one of two answers. I can give the academy answer and say that it was very deliberate and I had a plan in mind and I executed that plan exactly to the letter. But this isn't the case.
-- Ron Currie Jr.

#Two #Giving #Mind
On a micro level, if we're not terribly lucky, this sort of thing can happen to us quite frequently - the political becoming the personal in dramatic and irreparable ways. I remember the first time I went out into the desert, passing by all these mine fields and getting the history on them from my guide and realizing all these murderous mechanisms were real, were just sitting out there waiting for a victim, and some of them had been for sixty, seventy, eighty years.
-- Ron Currie Jr.

#Real #Years #Passing By
Most of my writing is an effort, one way or another, to figure something out about myself, and often when I read dialogue between my characters I recognize it as a discussion between two aspects of my own personality, aspects which are too often at odds.
-- Ron Currie Jr.

#Character #Writing #Odds
I tend toward the pessimistic end of the spectrum, and unfortunately there's little in human history to convince me that pessimism is unwarranted.
-- Ron Currie Jr.

#Pessimistic #Littles #Pessimism
As an atheist and lapsed Catholic, I feel the absence of faith in my own life quite acutely.
-- Ron Currie Jr.

#Atheist #Catholic #Absence
I wonder if kids growing up now are actually going to have that - if they're ever going to be able to unplug and have that ability to concentrate, or if it's just never going to happen for them. It's a little unnerving, frankly.
-- Ron Currie Jr.

#Growing Up #Kids #Littles

You may also like:

Alexander Chee
Fiction writer
Amy Shearn
Author
Ben Fountain
Fiction writer
Ben Loory
Fiction writer
Brad Listi
Author
Danielle Trussoni
Writer
David Guterson
Novelist
David Wain
Comedian
Dinaw Mengestu
Novelist
Jami Attenberg
Author
Jonathan Evison
Writer
Laila Lalami
Novelist
Maile Meloy
Writer
Matthew Weiner
Director
Paul Rudd
Actor
Scott McClanahan
Writer
Steve Almond
Writer
Steve Erickson
Novelist
Christine Sneed
Kate Zambreno
Writer