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He was in love with serious literature. And tragedy. Well, he lived on the border. And on the border you could be in love with tragedy without being tragic.
And anyway, nobody knew who I was. Not even me.
Sundays were mine. The rest of the week belonged to my responsibilities, my writing, my family, my friends, my commitments.
But there was never anything to say when it mattered so much to say something.
“You’re something better than beautiful,” he said. “What’s better than beautiful?” “Interesting. Interesting is much better than beautiful.”
That’s the one thing I hadn’t made up about him—that he was humble. That he was sweet. That he was decent. Good-looking men were rarely any of those things.
grief was also a cruel thief that stole away the control you had over your own body.
In the afternoons, we took turns reading our favorite passages from our favorite novels to each other.
I asked myself if sympathy was a good word or a bad word.
I wanted normal, but something about normal scared me.
I liked the sound of her voice—what she was saying didn’t matter so much. And anyway, men weren’t good at translating what women said.
A voice as a instrument to evoke plain sound rather than meaning through words.
It wasn’t the words that mattered. It was me. I mattered. So now I would have to fight to translate myself back into the world of the living.
I guess you could say I always liked everything nice and neat—even though I knew that everything was chaos.
“Kindness has nothing to do with love,”
You seem comfortable enough with words.” “I have a formal and aesthetic relationship to words.”
“We all serve people what they want.
“Why would anybody want to feel alive?”
I was trying to decide if I was good looking or not. I hated that it mattered so much.
Girls always arrived in packs. It was protection. That’s how I thought about it. It made me sad to think that they needed it.
I guess I didn’t feel much like partying. Maybe there was something wrong with me.
I liked thinking about things.
But being alone was really good. Really, really good.
The needing-to-feel-alive thing.
Feeling vs being alive again
“You don’t deserve this, Brian.” I wanted to shove that phrase into his heart. But I knew he’d always believe that he did deserve what he got. I somehow understood that.
He was going to say something else—but he didn’t.
“Nothing is ever as private as you think it is.”
Their physical beauty aside, they lived tortured, miserable lives.
forgiveness has a statute of limitations.”
phobia: they were all afraid of being happy.
My parents were theater.
my uncles and aunts argue about nothing that really mattered,
