More on this book
Community
Kindle Notes & Highlights
He had, once or twice, imagined it. How it would feel to say, to his bank account and his car and his condo and his girlfriend and his job, Go away. Leave me alone. So he could rest, and listen, and think, and maybe have a chance, one last chance, to remember what he’d been meaning to do before all this life he was living got started.
It was a good feeling, anonymity.
“Do you believe, Dex Howard,” Vince asked, “that you are real?”
you have accepted the central, implicit thesis of existence—you exist as real because you know, as of yet, no other way of being.
the true prize, the jewel at the end of the journey, is the discovery of the self. The selves, whether they be wrought or revealed, recognized at long last.”
Having someone care about you makes you want to give a shit, especially if you’re having trouble caring about yourself.
Everything began beneath the ground.
Archie broke rules because he thought, as did so many born under a dollar sign, that the rules applied to other people. This was less attractive, philosophically. But it wasn’t unattractive.
Elision was the best kind of lying. You didn’t even have to lie, just selectively tell.
He just looked like a rich white douche. An unconventionally handsome rich white douche, but a rich white douche nonetheless.
Maybe this was how adult friendships happened: by accident, embroidered over time, visible only from the height of years.
so full, of hope
and though he’d gotten pretty good at ignoring what the universe was telling him to do (most recently: quit your soul-sucking job and open a karaoke bar!), it didn’t mean he couldn’t still hear it screaming.
Dex had never met an adult man so obviously in earnest. He wanted to make a warm nest for him, a shelter from the vulgarities of the world and all the bigger, crueler animals that would chew him up and spit him out.
Maybe it was the whole game, making him suggestible and sensitive to ridiculous notions he’d grown a hearty hide against years ago.
he’d found the fine-art nerds both delusional and charming;
“We spend our whole lives becoming worthy. Of ourselves. Our mysteries, our solutions, the fruits of our quests.”
Libraries had always made her feel like a kid, in a good way: secret and safe and taken care of, rocked to sleep in a cocoon of books.
After all, the world he’d been raised in had never disabused him of the notion that he couldn’t, if the spirit moved him, be Batman.
The Much Worse was gentle. The Much Worse was cottony and condescending. The Much Worse was Oh honey. It was Don’t worry. It’s not your fault. The Much Worse was a nice woman with glasses who took notes while Tuesday talked to her, tried to explain that she knew it sounded crazy and maybe it was, maybe IT was crazy, but Tuesday wasn’t.
The Much Worse was her brother treating her like she would break, or had already broken, like she had to be kept on a high shelf and not be played with, ever, because if she broke any more she’d have to be thrown away.
When she was drunk, she was both her most anesthetized and her most sensitive.
“I’m not an attention whore,” Dex said. “I mean, I like attention. Who doesn’t.” Rabbit said, “Okay.” “I’m just—what Tuesday said. That’s not why I—that’s not.” Only it was. Of course it was.
he knew her too; and while that wasn’t all of her, it was her. She was never not herself.)
For an auditory hallucination of terminally undigested grief, Abby did sound legitimately sorry.
even though they were strangers, they knew each other.
But it’s what an Arches does. An Arches kills.
don’t hoard what you’ve been given, because you think it’s all you’re going to get. Be generous. And be generous now, because the future isn’t a destination. It’s an extension of how we choose to live today.
But he didn’t have to be all one thing or all another. He didn’t have to live only one life at a time. And a living wasn’t something you made but something you did. Again and again, over and over, always, always becoming.
“Don’t cheat your friendships. Don’t ask them to mean less to you than they do, or think they only have value if they’re a stop on the way to a real relationship.” Dorry rolled her eyes. “All relationships are real,” said Tuesday. “Friendship can be as deep as the ocean. It’s all a kind of love, and love isn’t any one kind of thing.”
