More on this book
Community
Kindle Notes & Highlights
The moment anything occurred, they would say every night at dinner, it was gone, relegated to the fiction of memory. They would say that with their heads bowed, and then they would begin eating.
“It’s a dry heat,” people from the desert often say to others, trying to disguise the fact that they’re kidding themselves.
He knew one day there would be an End to all of this, and long before that there would be an end to Larry.
Two generations of memory is all that children provide, and then everyone is forgotten.
And soon, the impossible would reveal itself to be a thin and pliable barrier.
Sometimes an act as simple as a person recognizing you, your bulk, the tangibility of your skin. That can mean everything.”
What I remember feeling was that there was no way to reverse this. That I had crossed a threshold and there was no way to cross back out. It was the worst feeling in the world.
Being a neat person, she was annoyed at herself about the mess she had left. All he noticed about her apartment was her.
There was a moment, right in the middle, when she saw his face close to hers, sweaty, a few stray hairs from his sideburns sticking out, and she thought, How strange we are, how strange this is, but how nice, how good, but how strange.
And near the center of Night Vale, the Moonlite All-Nite Diner, a twenty-four-hour place for food and drink and a reminder that other people are alive and exist, even in the most quiet and lonely hours of the night.
Not a couple by any definition except quantity, a pair with no specific affiliation except the pleasurable memory they both shared of the night before.
“Can I not go back?” Jackie frowned for a moment and then shrugged. “Who wants to go back? It’s like my mom says, ‘You can’t change the past without creating a cascading series of unintended consequences.’ She says that every morning and cries.”
I thought he was someone else. I thought he was a nice guy with . . . I don’t know . . . a body I guess.
It had been an unproductive day, but at least it hadn’t been counterproductive.
“Arrest her,” Pamela said into the microphone. “Wait. Why? I’m just looking for the bathroom.” “Aren’t we all, metaphorically, just looking for the bathroom?”
In the undulating waves of hot air, Nilanjana and her car looked like a dream scrawled across a visible reality.
Had they ever been friends? They had had lunch and then sex and then breakfast, but if that was all it took to become friends then the definition of friendship needed work.
Saying a moment is awkward has never made an awkward moment better, but it’s a tactic that humans keep trying over and over.
“I feel determined. Is that anything like ready?” “It’s the closest most people get.”
The hot breeze ruffled the grass, glistening with water stolen from wetter regions, and she tried to pretend that this was fine, that she was fine.
But did she know him? Of course she didn’t. She knew what he presented to the world. She knew how his hands felt, what the sweat on his neck smelled like. But that wasn’t knowing someone.
Like most dreams, it was lasting and memorable, but only in the part of the brain that hides information.
