More on this book
Community
Kindle Notes & Highlights
How was it fair to celebrate those guys for faith that wasn’t faith at all, that was just obedience to what they plainly observed to be true? And what sense did it make to punish the rest of humanity who had never been privy to such explicit revelation? To make everyone else lurch from crisis to crisis, desperately alone?
Cyrus didn’t write so much as he drank about writing,
“That’s it, really. The big pathological sad. Whether I’m actually thinking about it or not. It’s like a giant bowling ball on the bed, everything kind of rolls into it.”
The only people who speak in certainties are zealots and tyrants.”
meant it was a different thing entirely from what he was feeling. Ali’s anger felt ravenous, almost supernatural, like a dead dog hungry for its own bones.
destruction was inevitable, the endpoint of every people.
“Right. When people think about traveling to the past, they do it with this wild sense of self-importance. Like, ‘gosh, I better not step on that flower or my grandfather will never be born.’ But in the present we mow our lawns and poison ants and skip parties and miss birthdays all the time. We never think about the effects of that stuff.” Roya was working herself up. “Nobody thinks of now as the future past.”
We started whiny, without grace. Obsessed only with our own needing. And the dead couldn’t teach us anything about that. No facts or tables or proofs. You just had to live and suffer and then teach your kids to do the same. From a distance, habit passing for happiness.
Living happened till it didn’t. There was no choice in it. To say no to a new day would be unthinkable. So each morning you said yes, then stepped into the consequence.
A martyr wears simple footwear, he thought to himself.
She was Christian but American Christian, the kind that believed Jesus had just needed a bigger gun.
He wanted to live perfectly enough to die without creating a ripple of pain behind him, like an Olympic diver knifing splashlessly into the pool.
“Lord, increase my bewilderment.”
After that first kiss, I wouldn’t have questioned anything. Possibility, freedom. If a great winged angel had come up from the earth and burst apart, I would have gathered its feathers.
He wanted, acutely in that moment, to be not-alive. Not to be dead, not to kill himself, but to have the burden of living lifted from his shoulders.
His life was too fucked at present for his death to even count toward anything. A meaningless life meant a meaningless death. He wasn’t even sure if he believed that, but his current state had increased his tolerance for despondent generalizing.
“Art is where what we survive survives.”
things. She never looked at me like she desired me as a man. I don’t think she ever really wanted me that way. From when we very first met. I think she always looked at me different, like the way you’d look at a baby bird you found and tried to nurse back to health. Some combination of affection and pity. The pity, though. That was such a big part of it.”
The whole Abrahamic world invests itself in this promise: Don’t lie, don’t cheat, don’t fuck or steal or kill, and you’ll be a good person. Eight of the ten commandments are about what thou shalt not. But you can live a whole life not doing any of that stuff and still avoid doing any good. That’s the whole crisis. The rot at the root of everything.
I had words—enough to say “please” and “sorry” and “thank you”—all you need in any language, really, unless you’re a philosopher.
It’s easy for people who have sacrificed nothing to rationalize their own ordinariness by calling me lucky. But I sacrificed my entire life; I sold it to the abyss. And the abyss gave me art.
Love was a room that appeared when you stepped into it. Cyrus understood that now, and stepped.
