If a boy became sick he walked alone; the others were afraid to catch what he had, and did not want to know him too well for he would surely die soon. We did not want his voice in our heads.
We are not meant to know everything, Mae. Did you ever think that perhaps our minds are delicately calibrated between the known and the unknown? That our souls need the mysteries of night and the clarity of day?
His mind seemed barely tethered to his body, much less the earth.
It was as if, for a moment, she thought Mae was one kind of person, but now, knowing she was another, she could part with her, she could give her back to the world.
Your life has been lived a hundred times. A thousand times. It’s not all that great, really. Don’t take it so seriously. Don’t handle it so delicately.
Animals howl, he had been told, to declare their existence.
But when friends would ask Kathy whether they, too, should start their own business, she talked them out of it. You don’t run the business, she would say. The business runs you.
Their howls rose to the sky and twisted together until they were on, and the other beasts joined in too, all of their voices creating a wild, plaintive song of sorry and abandon and anger and love.
We both see strangers and react. We don’t like to walk by people without nodding. We’re broken when people are rude. Were broken when people can’t meet us halfway. We can’t accept the limits of normal human relations-chilly, clothed, circumscribed. Our hearts pull against their leashes.
The heat was alive, predatory.
The money that could have saved the Shuttle, and the money we send to random countries, that we use to remake unchangeable countries ten thousand miles away.
If you don’t want anyone to know about your existence, you might as well kill yourself. You’re taking up space, air.
We are unusual and tragic and alive.
I need eight hours to get maybe 20 minutes of work done. I had one of those yesterday: seven hours of self-loathing.
Pain comes at me and I take it, chew it for a few minutes, and spit it back out. It’s just not my thing anymore.
I will not wait to love as best as I can. We thought we were young and that there would be time to love well sometime in the future. This is a terrible way to think. It is no way to live, to wait to love.
You invite things to happen. You open the door. You inhale. And if you inhale the chaos, you give the chaos, the chaos gives back.
You know how you finish a bag of chips and you hate yourself? You know you’ve done nothing good for yourself. That’s the same feeling, and you know it is, after some digital binge. You feel wasted and hollow and diminished.
Books have a unique way of stopping time in a particular moment and saying: Let’s not forget this.
We must do extraordinary things. We have to. It would be absurd not to.