No one is waiting for me. In this story, I’m the girl no one is waiting for.
I’m sorry and I believe in you and I’ll always be near you, protecting you, and I will never leave you, I’ll be curled around your heart for the rest of your life.
It’s finished. Everything went past, without me.
Vinegar: that’s what fear smells like.
She’d risked everything, and here was the result: the raw, warped core of her life.
She looks like someone I want to know, or maybe even be.
It’s turning out to be a bad day, a day when the sun feels like teeth.
Oh we’ll know each other forever, Bix says. The days of losing touch are almost gone.
The problem was precision, perfection; the problem was digitization, which sucked the life out of everything that got smeared through its microscopic mesh.
There’s a fine line between thinking about somebody and thinking about not thinking about somebody, but I have the patience and the self-control to walk that line for hours – days, if I have to.
I know I’m famous and irresitible – a combination whose properties closely resemble radioactivity – and I know that you in this room are helpless against me.
We stand there, quiet. My questions all seem wrong: How did you get so old? Was it all at once, in a day, or did you peter out bit by bit? When did you stop having parties? Did everyone else get old too, or was it just you? Are other people still here, hiding in the palm trees or holding their breath underwater? When did you last swim your laps? Do your bones hurt? Did you know this was coming and hide that you knew, or did it ambush you from behind?
I felt no shame in these activities, because I understood what almost no one else seemed to grasp: that there was only an infinitesimal difference, a difference so small that it barely existed except as a figment of the human imagination, between working in a tall green glass building on Park Avenue and collecting litter in a park. In fact, there may have been no difference at all.
Rebecca was an academic star. Her new book was on the phenomenon of word casings, a term she’d invented for words that no longer had meaning outside quotation marks. English was full of these empty words – “friend” and “real” and “story” and “change” – words that had been shucked of their meanings and reduced to husks. Some, like “identity” and “search” and “cloud,” had clearly been drained of life by their Web usage. With others, the reasons were more complex; how had “American” become an ironic term? How had “democracy” come to be used in an arch, mocking way?
How do you know a gangster?” “Usually, the room goes a little quiet when he walks in.
Cheating is like a girl’s maidenhead. Doesn’t matter if she’s done it once or a hundred times; she’s ruined just the same.
Each time Anna moved from her father’s world to her mother and Lydia’s, she felt as if she’d shaken free of one life for a deeper one. And when she returned to her father, holding his hand as they ventured out into the city, it was her mother and Lydia she shook off, often forgetting them completely. Back and forth she went, deeper – deeper still – until it seemed there was no place further down she could go. But somehow there always was. She had never reached the bottom.
We’ll emerge from this war victorious and unscathed, and become bankers to the world. We’ll export our dreams, our language, our culture, our way of life. And it will prove irresistible.
Eddie had never noticed how much of his own speech derived from the sea, from “keeled over” to “learning the ropes” to “catching the drift” to “freeloader” to “gripe” to “brace up” to “taken aback” to “leeway” to “low profile” to “the bitter end,” or the very last link on a chain.
All that love, all that pain, all the stuff people feel – not just me and you, brother, but everyone, everyone who’s ever walked this beautiful green planet – how can all that disappear when somebody dies? It can’t disappear, it’s too big. Too strong, too... permanent. So it moves to another frequency, where the human ear can’t pick up.