Quotes by Rebecca McNutt

The print was an old one made from a negative taken in the 1960’s of her parents in Sydney Mines, dancing with thrilled, excited expressions on their faces, in front of a classic car that had been a wedding gift at the time. Her mother’s hair, red back then, was held back by a blue handkerchief, and she was dressed in a billowing skirt and white blouse. Her father’s denim jeans and faded t-shirt were streaked with coal dust as he held her hands and spun her around in the front yard of their old clapboard house, yellow grass under their feet and a cobalt-blue sky with white clouds drifting above. Mandy could almost feel the late summer breeze as she gazed deeply into the print, watching the flamboyant colors come to life. She hung it up to dry on two wooden clothespins hanging from a string above her.

Every day it’s something worse being predicted. Mearth says that sooner or later copyright on books will be all in the past because they’ll all be available electronically. She says that electric cars will replace gasoline-powered cars. She says that something called drones will be used to watch the entire country, she talks a lot about something called nanotechnology, and 3-dimensional printing and cellular phones being implanted into peoples’ minds and all available careers being replaced by robots and human cloning and overpopulation and film becoming obsolete, cellular phones making regular telephones obsolete and LED lighting replacing everything and eventually she says that the planet will collapse and become an apathetic wreck,” Alecto replied rapidly, his run-on sentence sounding sinister and dangerous. “Mearth says that eventually people will be able to see inside the minds of everyone.

…So, um, you’re from Rochester? Like, New York?” Jersey asked.“Yup, we used to live out there,” Rudger confirmed, nonchalant. “You ever been?”“Naw, the closest I’ve ever been to there would be… well, believe it or not, New Jersey, the place where my parents named me after. It was crowded, polluted and full of crime… I loved it.

There are some things in the past that… that just aren’t meant to be viewed.

Just because something isn’t good doesn’t mean it’s bad.

People never like pollution, it has become very wrong to like pollution at all. But just like there are good and bad things about people, there are good and bad things about pollution. If people were pollution we would get rid of anyone who was different, anyone who was considered an inconvenience… but we’d be getting rid of a life, a lot of lives… because we didn’t like them. If pollution was a person would we still be trying to get rid of it? Would we have environmentalists still complaining and protesting and trying to get rid of all pollution?

Super 8 film is the language of silence.

I never said I was sad, I’m just pessimistic,” said Alecto. “Expect the worst, that way you’ll never be disappointed, Mandy Valems.

If I hear the phrase selfie one more time, Ill have to enroll myself in anger management classes.

On Wall Street, Clarence was a diamond in a sea of glass, never greedy, never an ambulance-chaser, never the kind of person who deserved to die in the way that he did.

Yeah, you’re right about having entire rooms full of film and photos… in that Sydney Mines house I have a darkroom, I have boxes of film and home movie footage… I have a few projectors, I have piles of Kodachrome slides… I like photographs. The world is always running away from society and the only way to keep the stuff that’s happened in the past is by taking photographs, I can keep memories of things alive with photographs,” Alecto responded. “People say that a time machine can’t be invented, but they’ve already invented a device that can stop time, cameras are the world’s first time machines… The steel mill, the coal mines, the train tracks, the smog in the sky, I’ve been able to rescue it on super-8 and Kodachrome, and no one can remediate those photographs, I can keep them as long as I want to.

We get along like a house on fire these days.

You’re such a great liar when you lie to yourself.

What goes up, must come down. Well, Issac Newtons law doesnt apply to the internet. Thats what people dont realize. When you put something up, as long as there is an internet there will be that same stuff. When youre a senior citizen, what you uploaded to Facebook at a high school party will still be there. Whatever you upload to the internet, no matter how strong your passwords and security are, guaranteed the government or some advertising corporation will look at what you post someday. The only law that applies to the internet is, For every reaction, there is an equal and opposite reaction. Post a photograph and youll get attention. Post your old scanned Kodak slides and family home movies, youll get a nostalgia rush and youll reunite people with better days. But post a bad thing, thinking you can go unnoticed, and youll never be able to crawl out from underneath it.

There’s a good reason for everything, ain’t there?

Try as you might, youll never be able to please an environmentalist. You can stop using coal to heat your house, you can stop throwing out bottles and cans, you can have every factory in Canada shut down and you can buy only organic gluten-free non-GMO food, you can give up your favorite station wagon for a weird electric hybrid, you can stop developing film and buy a never-ending cycle of digital cameras, you can give up your job at a refinery or mill, and theyll still get after you for not enjoying yourself while doing so.

Life is not the end, and death is just the beginning...

Alecto, do you think we have fallen from heaven, or do you think we are falling towards it?

Where did the stereotypical image of the reclusive author in a bathrobe and slippers, indulging in vices and spending hours before a typewriter, even come from? I dont know about you, but most writers dont have the luxury of doing any of this. Otherwise wed have no life experience and nothing to write about, anyway.

Maybe a holiday miracle will change Mearth’s awful behavior,” Mandy suggested with optimism.“The only holiday miracle around here is that Mearth hasn’t murdered us both yet,” said Alecto, lighting another cigarette, his hands shaking erratically. He looked exhausted and terrified, his gray eyes soulless.“Do you know what Mearth likes, Alecto?” Mandy questioned.“Vegetables, she likes celery a lot, and lettuce,” Alecto responded in a quiet monotone. “I don’t know what else she likes. I’ve never asked her.”“Well, she has to like something… doesn’t everyone?”“Not her, Mandy Valems.