Memory, you realized long ago, is a game that a healthy-brained person can play all the time, and the game of memory is won or lost on one criterion: Do you leave the formation of memories to happenstance, or do you decide to remember?
This life is filled with inescapable moral compromises. We should do what we can to avoid the easy ones.
Long relationships might be richer, but relatively brief, relatively uncomplicated encounters with interesting people could be lovely as well. Every person you knew, every person you loved even, did not have to consume you for the time to have been worthwhile.
There is no purity to bearing pain alone.
I love that world more, I think, because it is perfectible. Because I have perfected it. The actual world is the random garbage fire it always is. There’s not a goddamn thing I can do about the actual world’s code.
She had once read in a book about consciousness that over the years, the human brain makes an AI version of your loved ones. The brain collects data, and within your brain, you host a virtual version of that person. Upon the person’s death, your brain still believes the virtual person exists, because, in a sense, the person still does. After a while, though, the memory fades, and each year, you are left with an increasingly diminished version of the AI you had made when the person was alive.
You couldn’t be old and still be wrong about as many things as she’d been wrong about, and it was a kind of immaturity to call yourself old before you were.
How I will miss the horses.
The alternative to appropriation is a world in which artists only reference their own cultures.
That love is all there is; is all we know of love. It is enough; the freight should be proportioned to the groove.” What is the “freight”? he wondered. What is the “groove”?
You try again. You fail better.
How much of your life had been happenstance? How much of your life had been a roll of the big polyhedral die in the sky? But then, weren’t all lives that way? Who could say, in the end, that they had chosen any of it?
It is to acknowledge that love is both a constant and a variable at the same time.
The most important thing is finding someone you wish to play with.
If this were a game, he could hit pause. He could restart, say different things, the right ones this time. He could search his inventory for the item that would make Sadie not leave.
It’s tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow. It’s the possibility of infinite rebirth, infinite redemption.
Sammy, we were together. You must know that. When I’m honest with myself, the most important parts of me were yours.
Friendship is friendship, and charity is charity... the people who give you charity are never your friends. It is not possible to receive charity from a friend.
And this is the truth of any game – it can only exist at the moment that it is being played. It’s the same with being an actor. In the end, all we can ever know is the game that was played, in the only world that we know.
They had the rare kind of friendship that allowed for a great deal of privacy within it. One of the reasons they had become such good friends originally was because she had not insisted he tell his sad stories to satisfy her own curiosity. The least he could do was return the favor.