I think the one thing that’s changed over time is that I’ve come to realise, as a fiction writer, the fact that I don’t think it will work out, doesn’t mean that it actually won’t.
I’ve never been that confident. I don’t tend to think, swaggeringly, I’m going to ace this. It’s just not who I am.
Nineteen eighty is almost here, thank God. the hippies are getting old, they blew their brains on acid and now they’re begging on street corners all over San Francisco. Their hair is tangled and their bare feet are thick and gray as shoes. We’re sick of them.
Kathy was a Republican, one of those people who used the unforgivable phrase “meant to be” – usually when describing her own good fortune or the disasters that had befallen other people.
He looks tired, like someone walked on his skin and left footprints.
And Alex understood that Scotty Hausmann did not exist. He was a word casing in human form: a shell whose essence has vanished.
What he needed was to find fifty more people like him, who had stopped being themselves without realizing it.
That we have some history together that hasn’t happened yet.
Kissing Mother Superior, incompetent, hairball, poppy seeds, on the can.
I can’t tell if she’s actually real, or if she’s stopped caring if she’s real or not. Or is not caring what makes a person real?
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.