A child who’s got the habit will start reading under the covers with a flashlight,” she said. “If the parents are smart, they’ll forbid the child to do this, and thereby encourage her. Otherwise she’ll find a peer who also has the habit, and the two of them will keep it a secret between them.
They’re all about being the special one, the chosen one. ‘Only you can save the world from Evil.’ That kind of thing. And never mind that specialness stops meaning anything when every kid is special. I remember watching those movies and thinking about all the unspecial characters in the chorus or whatever. The people just doing the hard work of belonging to society. They’re the ones my heart really goes out to. The movie should be about them.
Joey wished there were some different world he could belong to, some simpler world in which a good life could be had at nobody else’s expense.
Love turned out to be soul-crippling, stomach-turning, weirdly claustrophobic: a sense of endlessness bottled up inside him, endless weight, endless potential, with only the small outlet of a shivering pale girl in a bad rain jacket to escape through. Touching her was the farthest thing from his mind. The impulse was to throw himself at her feet.
There’s something very wrong when a taste bud is still reporting strangeness five hours after you had a sweetened drink. Do you know that if you smoke crystal meth even once, your entire brain chemistry is altered for the rest of your life? That’s what stevia tastes like to me.” “I’m not sitting here puffing on a meth stem, if that’s what you’re trying to say.
After Gary had given the enlargements their sour baths, he raised the lights and discovered that both prints were webbed over with peculiar yellow blotches. He cursed a little, not so much because he cared about the prints as because he wanted to preserve his good spirits, his serotonin-rich mood, and to do this he needed... cooperation from the world of objects.
Secrets are the way you know you even have an inside.
The Berglunds were the super-guilty sort of liberals who needed to forgive everybody so their own good fortune could be forgiven; who lack the courage of their privilege.
Impossibility is attractive.
Sleep was the ideally work-compatible girl he ought to have married in the first place. Perfectly submissive, infinitely forgiving, and so respectable you could take her to church.
Pip wondered what the secret was of being different in a way that attracted people, as opposed to her own way.
Once a killer, always a killer.
Plus. she’d already been downstairs for so long that it would be unpleasant to go up and beg Jason for further patience, and her life was already so fraught with unpleasantnesses that she’d adopted the strategy of delaying encounters with them as long as possible, even when the delay made it likely that they would be even more unpleasant when she did encounter them.
He cried for a long time. I stroked his head and held him close. If he’d been a woman, I would have kissed his hair. But strict limits to intimacy are straight man’s burden.
Time stops for the duration of a cigarette: when you’re smoking, you’re acutely present to yourself; you step outside the unconscious rush of life. This is why the condemned are allowed a final cigarette... it’s a lot easier to leave the world if you’re certain that you have really been in it.
He wondered if an action, to qualify as authentically good, needed not only to be untainted by self-interest but also to bring no pleasure of any kind.
The dream of a novel was more resilient than other kinds of dreaming. It could be interrupted in mid-sentence and snapped back into later.
He was realizing too late that old people weren’t entirely stupid.
Did his soul change every time it achieved a new insight? The very definition of a soul was immutability. Perhaps the root of his confusion was the conflation of soul and knowledge. Perhaps the soul was one of those tools built to do exactly one specific task, to know that I am I, and was mutable with respect to all other forms of knowledge?
It’s like there are these words, they’re out there in the world, and you start wondering what it would be like to say them. Words have their own power – they create the feeling, just by the fact of your saying them.