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Kindle Notes & Highlights
The car rumbled through the coming night and I felt happy. Everything was gentle, inside me and out. Only children can feel that kind of safety;
Breaking me, then mending me, over and over—that was my mother.
“Birds are the descendants of giants,” Mommy said. “Once they ruled the earth. When things got bad they made themselves small and agile and learned to live in treetops. The birds are a lesson in endurance.
The air smells strongly of cleaning products, a chemical impression of a flowering meadow. At some point in the future, I guess, almost no one will know what real meadow smells like. Maybe by then there won’t be any real meadows left and they’ll have to make flowers in labs. Then of course they’ll engineer them to smell like cleaning products, because they’ll think that’s right, and it will all go in a circle. These are the kinds of interesting thoughts I have while in waiting rooms and at crosswalks or standing in line at the grocery store.
The young feel pain intensely, I think, because they don’t know yet how deep it can go.
The body’s reactions to fear are so similar to that of love.
Thoughts are a door that the dead walk through.
People who have lived together for many generations share a special kind of madness.
