He would know that if he hadn’t been the person he was, terrified and cowardly and petty and insecure and sexually panicked and broken, Sadie might have been his.
She had resisted returning there because to return to one’s hometown felt like surrender.
He was like a bright, warm light over everything in her life. She felt lit up, turned on. There was no one better to talk to about games. Yes, she loved him, but she also liked him. She liked herself when she was with him.
You know very well that I was in Germany as a child, and you have heard the stories, so I won’t tell them to you again. But I can tell you that the people who give you charity are never your friends. It is not possible to receive charity from a friend.” “I hadn’t thought of it that way,” Sadie said. Freda stroked Sadie’s hand. “Mine Sadie. This life is filled with inescapable moral compromises. We should do what we can to avoid the easy ones.
He was happiest when he did not have to think about his body – when he could forget that he had a body at all.
Isn’t that the definition of insanity? Doing the same thing over and over but expecting a different result.
It was superior, he believed, to show love to those one loved. But now, it seemed like one of the easiest things in the world Sam could do. Why wouldn’t you tell someone you loved them? Once you loved someone, you repeated it until they were tired of hearing it. You said it until it ceased to have meaning. Why not? Of course, you goddamn did.
You are a gaming person, which is to say you are the kind of person who believes that “game over” is a construction. The game is only over if you stop playing. There is always one more life. Even the most brutal death isn’t final.
Maybe this is selfish, but I don’t want to love more than I am loved. And I don’t want to be with someone who loves something or someone more than me.
Your mother is in the bedside chair. She is wearing a dress printed with strawberries and birds. Using a long needle, she is stringing brightly origami cranes into garlands. It’s a Japanese custom called senbazaru. If you make one thousand paper cranes, you can restore someone to good health.
A truly magnificent thing about the way the brain was coded, Sam thought, was that it could say “Excuse me” while meaning “Screw you.
You go back to work. You take advantage of the quiet time that a failure allows you. You remind yourself that no one is paying any attention to you and it’s a perfect time for you to sit down in front of your computer and make another game. You try again. You fail better.
But I can tell you that the people who give you charity are never your friends. It is not possible to receive charity from a friend.
The alternative to appropriation is a world where white European people make art about white European people, with only white European references in it. Swap African or Asian or Latin or whatever culture you want for European. A world where everyone is blind and deaf to any culture or experience that is not their own.
If Marx at twenty-two had a problem, it was that he was attracted to too many things and people.
Sam blew out 10 candles and in the distance Mary Lou Retton received a perfect 10 on her floor routine. And he almost felt like he, by blowing out the 10 candles at the precise moment that he had, had been what caused her to get the perfect 10. He fanaticized that the universe was a Rube Goldberg machine. If he had blown out only 9 candles, maybe the Romanian girl would have won instead.
Promise me, we won’t ever do this again,” Sadie said. “Promise me, that no matter what happens, no matter what dumb thing we supposedly perpetrate on each other, we won’t ever go six years without talking to each other. Promise me you’ll always forgive me, and I promise I’ll always forgive you.” These, of course, are the kinds of vows young people feel comfortable making when they have no idea what life has in store for them.
I am here with you, his body seemed to say, but I acknowledge that we are separate beings.
There is no purity in art.
In a world of planar surfaces, someone became 3D.