More on this book
Community
Kindle Notes & Highlights
The hardest thing in the world is to live only once. But it’s beautiful here, even the ghosts agree.
How strange to feel something so close to mercy, whatever that was, and stranger still that it should be found in here of all places, at the end of a road of ruined houses by a toxic river. That among a pile of salvaged trash, he would come closest to all he ever wanted to be: a consciousness sitting under a lightbulb reading his days away, warm and alone, alone and yet, somehow, still somebody’s son.
Because to remember is to fill the present with the past, which meant that the cost of remembering anything, anything at all, is life itself. We murder ourselves, he thought, by remembering.
Everybody’s so sorry about what they don’t know shit about.”
“Hey. Do you think a life you can’t remember is still a good life?” The question sounded almost silly aloud. “I mean, like—” “Yes,” said Sony. “Why’s that?” “Because someone else will remember it.”
“Most people are soft and scared. They’re fucking mushy. We are a mushy species. You talk to anybody for more than half an hour and you realize everything they do is a sham to keep themselves from falling apart. From prison guards to teachers, to managers, psychiatrists, even fathers, anybody—even your stupid generals. People put on this facade of strength. They act like they have a purpose and a mission and their whole life is supposed to lead to this grand fucking thesis of who they are. But what happened, huh? Robert E. Lee sent all those people who believed in him across a half mile of
...more
Don’t you see it? We all want some story to make it bearable so we can keep living long enough to work our asses off until we’re in the ground,
Is it possible for a hole to be cut open and for you to step inside it—not to be destroyed, but simply gone? Where on earth was elsewhere possible? Is that what the pills do, in the end? Is that what was happening to Grazina? The brain’s derangement of itself to other reckonings? Is it possible to be a hog in a field left behind by Noah’s ark, whistling “Silent Night,” and not be the loneliest thing in the universe?
