89 quotes found
Writer · American
American writer
“Because if every moment of a life is present in every other, so is every old self you've ever tried to outrun. And then how to knowthe present self having always felt flimsy, somehow, compared to t...”
“Its a lesson some writers take a lifetime to learn: what makes us care about things is other people caring, too.”
“So he'll keep dragging himself up this bridge between possible worlds, this rickety ruin of light, trying to imagine it might matter if he makes it to the other side.”
“The absence of a skyline makes him doubt he'll ever get where he's going, and behind him, where he's come from might as well not be there.”
“Charlie tried to focus on what she was saying, but his head felt packed with gauze. Like no one could reach him in here, where it hurt.”
“I keep having this fantasy about some wide river or channel I'm on the bank of. I can look up, and on the far side is another, better self, holding hands with Mercerthat's his name, my exand both o...”
“You assumed whatever was vivid to yourself was vivid to others, and vice versa, but she was going to make him spell it out, for the first time in either of their lives.”
“When he lifted his head, the sun seemed impossibly close. Science-fictionally close.”
“Who didnt exist at the convergence of a thousand thousand stories?”
“That it may be the only thing the darkness makes clearer: who really matters is whoever you're most desperate to see.”
“An actual artist, living right under her nose.”
“HOW TO MAKE A REVOLUTIONARY CONSCIOUSNESS IS: educate yourself. On the train, for example, read the same two pages of Das Kapital over and over, willing them to make sense.”
“I looked at her, exhausted in the hospital bed, and she looked at you, and you looked at me looking at her with eyes that had never known anything else, and for a moment there I swear we saw each o...”
“There was this hot, yellowy stillness the air always got in the minutes before the last bell, as if it were stiffening itself to be shattered.”
“I didn't drink, I told him, with that embarrassed feeling I got whenever I was reminded that I had a body, that I looked like anything at all.”
“A funny thing happened post-diagnosis. They put him on drugs, things went up and down, but he lived. He lived. It was like a waiting room where they kept not calling your name.”
“Her eyes were glistening, but for some reason he couldn't reach out and touch her. It was like some gestures were so simple they were beyond him.”
“In a blacked-out house, stripped of all comforts, it's easy to turn your anger outward, to attack this city he's lying at the center of, with its filth and its pollution and its oppression, but rea...”
“And you out there: Arent you somehow right here with me?”
“Famous revolutionary,' you say, and the laughter pumps out of your chest like blood, great almost painful spurts of it splashing up the building faces toward the marquee moon.”
