From the Bookshelf of Buddy Reads…

What a treacherous thing it is to believe that a person is more than a person.

What a treacherous thing it is to believe that a person is more than a person.

It is so hard to leave—until you leave. And then it is the easiest goddamned thing in the world.

“It's more impressive. From a distance, I mean. You can't see the wear on things, you know? You can't see the rust or the weeds or the paint cracking. You see the place as someone once imagined it.”

“When did we see eachother face-to-face? Not until you saw into my cracks and I saw into yours.”

The town was paper, but the memories were not.

“Look at those cul-the-sacs, those streets that turn in on themselves, all the houses that were built to fall apart.
All this paper people living in their paper houses, burning the future to stay warm... Everyone demented with the mania of owning things. All the things paper-thin and paper-frail. And all the people, too.”

“You could also argue that there is something tragically heroic about fighting this battle he is going to lose. Is [his] hope a kind of insanity, or is it the very definition of humanness?”

It is easy to forget how full the world is of people, full to bursting, and each of them imaginable and consistently misimagined.

“Nothing ever happens like you imagine it will.” “But then again, if you don't imagine, nothing ever happens at all.”

“At some point, you gotta stop looking at the sky, or one of these days you'll look back down and see that you floated away too.”

Maybe Whitman had a gift I don't have. But as for me: I must ask the wounded man where he is hurt, because I cannot become the wounded man. The only wounded man I can be is me.

It's funny and all, but I'm tired.

Standing before this building, I learn something about fear.
I learn that it is not the idle fantasies of someone who maybe wants something important to happen to him, even if the important thing is horrible. It is not the disgust of seeing a dead stranger, and not the breathlessness of hearing a shotgun pumped outside of Becca Arrington's house.
This cannot be addressed by breathing exercises. This fear bears no analogy to any fear I knew before.
This is the basest of all possible emotions, the feeling that was with us before we existed, before this building existed, before the earth existed. This is the fear that made fish crawl out onto dry land and evolve lungs, the fear that teaches us to run, the fear that makes us bury our dead.

Consciousness makes for poor windows ... She made as poor a window as I did.

A Margo for each of us—and each more mirror than window.

“I always liked routine. I suppose I never found boredom very boring.”

“In sickness and in health. In good times and in bad. For richer, for poorer. Till dawn do us part.”