Oliver Miller

“We are birds, and birds can fly.”

“Lisa, if I’ve learned anything, it’s that life is just one crushing defeat after another until you just wish Flanders was dead.”

“Now that I’m with you again, I’m in agony.”

“Look into my eye.”

“That guy’s gotta stop. …He’ll see us.”

People romanticize the past all out of proportion, but the past can still be our lives. Taking up smoking will help teach you this: for smoking is an attempt to master time.

In some ways, it’s more aggravating that I came so close to having a threesome. If it had never been a possibility, then I might never have cared. But to fly so close to the threesome sun, and then to fail, to fall… well, it makes me feel like Icarus.

I have really good taste in book and movies, and then when it comes to music, I just sort of give up. When I start making a mix CD for a friend, I start off with a couple of good tracks by, say, The New Pornographers or someone — and then I start feeling an inevitable drift towards the shitty, shitty songs that I actually love. Then I start coming up with excuses in my head: “Maybe X also likes the Spice Girls,” I say to myself, knowing that this is not, in fact, the case.