Tom McAllister Quotes

• “Some (sea)shells have magic in them. If you listen really closely, you can hear voices from another world.”

  Tom McAllister

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• “My problem is not a lack of dicks. My problem is an abundance of dicks, being surrounded by dicks, always being reminded that they’re ready to be unsheathed and used as a corrective if I step out of line.”

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• “Ban everything besides guns. Ban public space. Ban buildings. Ban trigger fingers. Ban anger. Ban flesh and organs and blood loss. Ban women and children who are easy targets and ban men who like to shoot at targets. Ban physics, and ban velocity. Ban human interaction.”

  Tom McAllister

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• “The culture at large had exerted the same pressure on her that it exerts on all women, namely to feel insecure about herself regardless of what she was doing, to feel that simply by being a woman in the world she was necessarily doing something wrong and could only correct her wrongness via endless consumerism and an array of contradictory neuroses. She’d been socialized to always apologize, to smile when a man told her to smile, to believe men who told her she was doing something wrong. Before”

  Tom McAllister

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• “Boys are made of snails and puppy-dog tails and pipe bombs and semiautomatic rifles. Girls are made of sugar and spice and who knows what else. Their anatomy is a mystery.”

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• “If you pass enough cars, you will have passed at least one murderer; that’s just statistics.”

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• “You need to allow her the freedom to go where she wants to go. If she wants to come back to you, she will. You can't force it on her. Her soul has to choose you.”

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• “To be a carpenter for a Christian church is a significant burden, considering the lineage.”

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• “Given enough time and enough tragedies, we will eventually run out of places for new memorials. Every square inch of the planet will be covered in plaques commemorating a war or a shooting or a building collapsing or a massive fire. We will be reminded of the inevitability of tragedy, but when you try to make it impossible to forget, then there is no point in remembering”

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• “People wanted to treat violence like the weather; it was there, inevitably, and they felt that with enough advanced equipment they could predict where it would strike next. The possibility of the violence not existing had not occurred to anyone.”

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• “All across the country,” the narrator of one video said, “innocent families are in danger.” They showed a montage of potential perpetrators: drug addicts, illegal immigrants, perverts, terrorists, sociopaths. “This country is in crisis,” the narrator said. “There’s only one way to ensure your safety.”

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• “They’re everywhere, these people who cannot function in the face of inconveniences, like long lines or a broken pair of sunglasses, people who explode into rages because someone ruined their picture in front of a historic monument, and when you see them, you think, what would these people do if they faced real trauma? How could they possibly survive an actual loss? Would they just stop breathing on the spot?”

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• “After eleven weeks, the investigation of the shooter was officially closed. The manifesto he’d written had told them everything, particularly who he hated and why. It was a list depressing in its banality, in its adolescent conviction that he’d discovered some grand truth about how people are phonies, how organized religion corrupts, how the world is mostly about pain. As if we didn’t all know this, as if we also weren’t trying to find ways to deal with it that didn’t involve murder.”

  Tom McAllister

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• “Every car is full of dead things, churning and grinding and conveying people from one place to another and eventually the people are dead too and replaced by other people. The monetization of large-scale death, the repurposing of extinction.”

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• “But you can’t do things over again. That’s the point. He wants them to understand the randomness of fate, to understand that he himself is fate personified, and he chose not to kill them, not because they’re special or more important or better prepared or more faithful or more likable, but because there is no reason but unreason.”

  Tom McAllister

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• “Some people tried to predict the next mass shooting based on risk factors and traveled to the sites in anticipation, like tornado hunters chasing funnel clouds.”

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• “A pile of books on the bedside table—exactly the books a smart but pretentious teenage boy would own: Nietzsche, Kerouac, Bukowski, Jim Morrison’s poetry.”

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• “Everyone says truth is an objective thing, but what if I find a different truth that makes more sense?”

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• “When you’re alone with a man and he asks if you want to see something interesting, it’s reasonable to worry that he’s talking about his penis. Men think their penises are much more interesting than they actually are.”

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• “The real problem is when people flinch from the sadness and hide.”

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• “Nature kills for no reason every day. If you want to make people safe, the best thing to do is to ban nature, to arrest nature and put it in jail where it can’t bother us anymore.”

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• “Facts are not facts at all; they’re just the first line of an argument.”

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• “You can consume so much media that it becomes toxic. The only option is to flush the system, to purge yourself and feel it burning in your esophagus then see it pooled at your feet.”

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• “Now at all hours, I could watch the conservative news network or the liberal news network or the centrist news network. They all told me we were doomed, but for different reasons. The news networks were run by billionaires, and the on-air talent were wealthy New Yorkers who ate at the same restaurants and pledged allegiance to their ratings. They looked the same and they represented no meaningful ideology. They aided and abetted the shooters by confusing the narrative. They didn’t know anything about the world but we trusted them because they dressed nicely and spoke with such certainty. I”

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• “In a just world, couples would all have the opportunity to break down together.”

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