In the movies, people almost never talked about the towns they spent their lives in; they ran around having adventures and never stopped to get their bearings. It was weird, when you thought about it. They only remembered where they were from if they wanted to complain about how awful it was there, or, later, to remember it as a place of infinite promise, a place whose light had been hidden from them until it became unrecoverable, at which point its gleam would become impossible to resist.
There are planets so far away from ours that no scientist will ever guess that they exits, let alone know the stories of their civilizations, their beginnings and ends. They’re not being kept secret from us, but they’re secret all the same.
You could hear, in the questions they asked and how they asked them, that there were right answers, things they wanted to hear.
Everything became infused with purpose. It’s hard to overstate how deep the need can get for things to make sense.
It’s in the nature of the landscape to change, and it’s in the nature of people to help the process along...
There are so many different kinds of ghosts.
I was little the first time I heard the term “ghost town”; I fell immediately in love.
I’ll tell you later” is a contingent claim that can be rendered false by any of several moves.
Came all this way and now here I am.
I looked out through the window at the road that led from hideous rooms like this to a safe refuge hidden deep in the ground somewhere in Kansas.
I can’t miss shopping like you’d miss things you once had. I miss it in a different way. I miss it like you would miss a train.
I knew she wanted to ask what I was doing, but I had the advantage. Nobody liked to see me speak.
Their grief wasn’t his to bear, he knew. But it was inside him all the same, like a secret entrusted to a messenger.
Working efficiently while a movie played was second nature to her by now, more comfortable than silence.
To the left, just past the painting, on the other side of the hall, is the bathroom, the sort of open door that if cameras found it as they passed through the house in a horror movie would trigger a blast of synthesizers.
My grief sought out all parts of my body it hadn’t yet inhabited, and I felt like I might collapse in on myself right there, at last, spectacularly.
I had this rising premonition about him turning to look over at me, catching me in the act of sort of staring at him for no reason. It was a premonition with texture and heft, something I could almost taste; in my mind I saw his head begin to turn, casually, gradually but decisively, until his eyes found mine and held them. I stood ready for this to happen, wondering what I’d do, but he stayed put.
In a movie version of this scene the driver wheels his glance abruptly to the window where a misshapen man stands watching it all unfold, and fixes me with a threatening look. That didn’t happen.
They don’t know they have expectations, but I show them by counterexample what their expectations were.
I thought about the guy in the truck, the focus in his expression, and I felt like I already knew enough of the story to tell it to somebody else maybe better than either of its major players could.