5 January 2005
Obsession: Quotations (OT)
1. “‘It’s an Asian ghost orchid. Pitiful-looking but rare and therefore desirable. You get so obsessed with these goddamn orchids that they all start to look beautiful,’ he said. ‘It’s part of the sickness’” (97).
2. “The world is so huge that people are always getting lost in it. There are too many ideas and things and people, too many directions to go. I was starting to believe that the reason it matters to care passionately about something is that it whittles the world down to a more manageable size. It makes the world seem not huge and empty but full of possibility” (109).
3. “‘She reminded me of a friend of mine who found this great weird orchid in Ecuador. What he didn’t realize was that he was on military land. So he gets stopped by the military police and they are really pissed, and they want him to hand over his bag of plants. So he says, ‘Go ahead, shoot me. I’m not leaving without this plant. I’d rather that you shoot me,’ and they look at him like he’s totally insane. Which he is’” (102).
4. “When I had first heard about Laroche I had thought of him as an extremist, a madman with a passion for orchids that was far removed from the average way that people feel about plants, about anything” (135).
5. “I still considered Laroche and his schemes exceptional—actually, something beyond exceptional—but he had started to seem more like the endpoint in a continuum. He was the oddball ultimate of those people who are enthralled by nonhuman living things and who pursue them like lovers” (136).
6. “Mr. Cohen looked a little depressed at the hearing, which began with the judge saying, ‘Mr. Cohen, are you under the influence of any drugs?’ I assume it is a standard question a judge asks before accepting a defendant’s plea, but I found myself thinking that the passion for plants was, for many of the people I was getting to know, more potent than any drug at all” (189).
7. “‘I’ve heard about the case, though. I don’t quite understand his passion for the ghost orchid. They’re cute, they’re cute, all right, but I just don’t think they’re that special’” (199). *on how one man’s take on an ordinary object could be another man’s obsession
8. “More and more, I felt that I was meeting people like Lee who didn’t at all seem part of this modern world and this moment in time—the world of petty aggravations and obligations and boundaries, a time of bored cynicism—because how they lived and what they lived for was so optimistic. They sincerely loved something, trusted in the perfectibility of some living thing, lived for a myth about themselves and the idea of adventure, were convinced that certain things were really worth dying for, believed that they could make their lives into whatever they dreamed” (201).
9. “‘…and I remember looking up as we pushed off and seeing the forlorn faces of the people left behind looking on. That’s what started my life of adventure. I knew I never wanted to be the one left on the shore’” (202). *on cause of obsession
10. “Anyway, he said, he was in a great frame of mind. ‘Look, the main thing is, the Internet is cool,’ he said. ‘It’s not going to die on me, like some plant, and it’s not going to fuck me over like the Seminoles’” (246-47).
11. “‘Martin, I want you to know I’ve given up nicotine, alcohol, and fornication. The only addiction I have left is orchids’” (254).
12. “This has always been a puzzlement to me, how to have a community but remain individual—how you could manage to be separate but joined, and somehow, amazingly, not lose sight of either your separateness or your togetherness” (256). *back to I vs C
13. “‘For some people, it’s just too intense, this whole orchid thing. It infects their whole being. John was just being eaten up by it’” (266).
14. “‘Of course I miss it,’ he muttered. ‘I mean, Jesus Christ. You just have to find something else to fill up your life’” (267). *John on giving up on orchids
15. “‘The thing about computers,’ Laroche said, ‘the thing that I like is that I’m immersed in it but it’s not a living thing that’s going to leave or die or something. I like having the minimum number of living things to worry about in my life’” (280). *Perhaps the loss of his mother to a car accident, the loss of his wife through divorce, and now the loss of orchids ignited obsession?