43 quotes found
“Truly unconditional love was suffocating, in that it took so little notice of who you actually were.”
“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...”
“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.”
“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.”
“That it may be the only thing the darkness makes clearer: who really matters is whoever you're most desperate to see.”
“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.”
“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.”
“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.”
“There were two optionscall the foul or don'tand either way, he would lose, but there was a thrill here in this moment when actual combat might have replaced the shadowboxing he'd been doing for mon...”
“Even the kids, behind the slice of streetscape floating in the glass, had mastered the art of pretending not to see.”
“He was a priest now, pagan, half-naked in the night, performing obscure rites of interment. Or he was the lead player in his own novel, or in one of those new arcade games William loved, compelled ...”
“Despite which, Charlie seems doomed to stumble around in the dark, clutching pieces of a puzzle he still can't see.”
“All these threads, like the ley-lines he'd read about in his Time-Life history books, converging on the Cicciaro girl, who lay there unaware, a glass-coffined beauty whose kingdom was in ruins.”
“The second this interminable wait ended, it would all start to fall away into the past, to become unreal.”
“You're hung up on something that's never going to love you back.”
“College stirred in her a certain contempt for virtues like kindness and persistence. She would have appeared to have been a kind and persistent person herself, but a steady diet of Antonioni films ...”
