Just about everybody has written a first novel that they throw away before writing their actual first novel.
Who can I complain to, if I don’t like the shape of the globe?
Phil Needle stood in the parking lot, suddenly grasping that this was so, that nothing is lost in a world utterly mapped, that nothing is rogue with everything cross-pollinated, as the shouts on the beach lured him across the street to the sand.
The screen shows me Portugal. The screen shows me Cairo. They have a thing where you can wander the streets. I can go anywhere I want is what the screen keeps telling me. Try this. Try there. Go around here. The world’s wide open. You can wander anyplace and you’ll be alone there, too.
Another song,” Allison says. “The one by that band, from when I was in high school, that saved my life the way songs do.
I guess it’s funny how life turns out?” she tried. “Not last I checked,” Errol said with a snort.
Right now I have the suspicion that the ace of diamonds is trapped forever, face down, beneath the king of diamonds, which is sneering at me like Juror Number Five, and my whole life feels like a similar misshuffle.
But more often the woman was alone and would walk around naked for some reason, neither beautiful enough nor ugly enough to make sense.
You don’t say,” Helena said. She took a cigarette out of her ripped purse and lit it because she smoked. She was a smoker.
The street was a yellow streak, however many yards wide, cabs and cabs and cabs and the occasional car that wasn’t a cab so the whole thing looked like a scarcely-been-touched ear of corn.
Phillip Murray and Wanda Saxton meet in the last scene under the rainy awning, their wrong wife and fiance finally story-lined away, and walk out together into the downpour – we know from the first scene, Christmas eve, that both of them like walking in the rain but don’t have anybody who will do it with them – and it’s the miracle of the ending.
Someday we will all be dead people but in the meantime we have these problems to solve.
I know all these facts about you and there is no longer any use for them.
You never love a book the way you love a book when you are ten. It is an honor to be in that sacred space in some children’s brains.
Allison decided it was okay sort of like if you’re in a car and it topples off a hill you decide it’s okay to fall, too.
There are stories about people who have loved someone forever after laying eyes on them for a few minutes and then nevermore, but these stories have not happened to anyone we know. No, when you love someone you spend hours and hours with them, and even the mightiest forces in the netherworld could not say whether the hours you spend increase your love or if you simply spend more hours with someone as your love increases.
It’s not like I hadn’t seen you before. Everyone had, you’re like, I don’t know, some movie everyone sees growing up, everybody’s seen you, nobody can remember not seeing you. But just suddenly I really, really needed to see you again right that minute, that night.
If you open this you’ll see it’s empty, and you’ll wonder for a sec if it was empty when you gave it yo me – I can see it – another empty gesture you slipped into my hand like a bad bribe.
And I hope that someday I’ll do another something stupid and I’ll have to say it a million times because that’s how long it’ll be, together with you, Min. With you.
How many happy people do you think there are in the world? Twelve?
I’m alone. There’s a poem in that, but I don’t want to write it. I don’t want to be someone who spends Saturday night alone at home, writing poems about being alone.