Phillip Lopate - Against joie de vivre (1989)

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The prospect of a long day at the beach makes me panic. There is no harder work I can think of than taking myself off to somewhere pleasant, where I am forced to stay for hours and 'have fun'.

Phillip Lopate
I vowed that I would always respect the right of an individual to kill himself. Whether suicide was a moral or immoral act I no longer felt sure, but of the dignity of its intransigence I was convinced.

Phillip Lopate
I imagined a psychic pain growing inside him (myself) that demanded some physical outlet. Suicide must have been his attempt to give Pain a body, a representation, to put it outside himself. A need to convert inner torment into some outward tangible wound that all could see. It was almost as though suicide were a last-ditch effort at exorcism, in which the person sacrificed his life in order that the devil inside might die.

Phillip Lopate
I am apt to be harsh in my secret judgments of others, seeing them as defective because they are not enough like me.

Phillip Lopate
The knowledge that my discriminations are skewed and not always universally desirable doesn't stop me in the least from making them.

Phillip Lopate
The dinner party is a suburban form of entertainment. Its spread in our big cities represents an insidious Fifth Column suburbanization of the metropolis.

Phillip Lopate
Think of a dinner party as a club of revolutionaries, a technocratic elite whose social interactions that night are a dry run for some future takeover of the state.

Phillip Lopate