How wrong to have been so negative, how wrong to have been so gloomy, how wrong to have run away from life, how wrong to have said no, again and again, instead of yes.
Nice people don’t necessarily fall in love with nice people.
But the first lesson reading teaches is how to be alone.
Sounded to me like he had a pretty good idea what he was saying,” Van replied, with surprisingly little anger. “It’s a pity he had to overintellectualize like that. He did such good work, and then he had to go and intellectualize it.
Birds were like dinosaurs’ better selves. They had short lives and long summers. We all should be so lucky as to leave behind such heirs.
What made drugs perpetually so sexy was the opportunity to be other. Years after he’d figured out that pot only made him paranoid and sleepless, he still got hard-ons at the thought of smoking it. Still lusted for that jailbreak.
And if you sat at the dinner table long enough, whether in punishment or in refusal or simply in boredom, you never stopped sitting there. Some part of you sat there all your life.
Even then, when the hike was perfect, I would wonder, ‘Now what?’ And take a picture. Take another picture. Like a man with a photogenic girlfriend he didn’t love.
Well, and that’s what really counts, isn’t it? I’ve become one of those women who put a ton of work into looking OK. If I can just go on and make a beautiful corpse, I’ll have the whole problem pretty well licked.
As she left her parents’ neighborhood, the houses got newer and bigger and boxier. Through windows with no mullions or fake plastic mullions she could see luminous screens, some giant, some miniature. Evidently every hour of the year, including this one, was a good hour for staring at a screen.
The guiding principle of Martin’s personality, the sum of his interior existence, was the desire to be left alone. If all those years he’d sought attention, even novelty, and if he still relished them, then that was because attention proved him different and solitude begins in difference.
What lived on-in me- was the discomfort of how completely I’d outgrown the novel I’d once been so happy to live in.
He had shining dark eyes and an oboe voice and mink-soft hair and could seem, even to Gary, more sentient animal than little boy.
My first hero was Thomas Edison, whose adult life had consisted entirely of free time.
When I see an actress or actor drag deeply in a movie, I imagine the pyrenes and phenols ravaging the tender epithelial cells and hardworking cilia of their bronchi, the monoxide and cyanide binding to their hemoglobin, the heaving and straining of their chemically panicked hearts.
An odd thing about beauty, however, is that it’s absence tends not to arouse our sympathy as much as other forms of privation do.
The following afternoon, alone in their room, and oppressed by not yet having made the promised call to Connie...
Part of why kids like this scared me was that they seemed authentic.
A candle is like a small sun, but the sun is like a large candle; examined closely, language turns out to operate through the lateral associations of metaphor, rather than through the vertical identifications of naming.
When a smoker says he wants to quit but can’t, what he’s really saying is, “I want to quit but I want even more not to suffer the agony of withdrawal.” To argue otherwise is to jettison any lingering notion of personal responsibility.