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“This was William Morris’s garden. These were his strawberries. These were birds he knew. No designer had ever used red or yellow in an indigo discharge dyeing technique before. He must have had to start over many times to get the colors right. This fabric is not just a fabric. It’s the story of failure and of perseverance, of the discipline of a craftsman, of the life of an artist.”
In a game, if a sign warns you not to open a certain door, you will definitely open that door. If it doesn’t work out, you can always go back to the save point and start again.
the coyotes were everywhere. He would see them in the front yard, sunning themselves, languorously eating fallen fruit from the cherimoya and loquat trees. He would see them loping down the streets of Silver Lake and Echo Park, sometimes in couples or in families, sorting through the trash outside the vegan place on Sunset, hiking stoically in Griffith Park, nursing their young. The coyotes felt capable, canny, and strangely anthropomorphized, as if they had been endowed with human features by a team of animators. Their hair seemed artfully disheveled, the haircut of a hot, young actor playing
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“I thought this place was so beautiful when I was nine, but now it seems ridiculous,” Sadie said, mainly to fill the silence. “Why? Hearst had the money, so he built himself exactly the world he wanted. There were zebras and swimming pools and bougainvillea and picnics, and no one ever died. How is it different than what we do?”
“What’s Torschlusspanik?” Sam said. “It means ‘gate-shut panic,’ ” Simon said. “It’s the fear that time is running out and that you’re going to miss an opportunity. Literally, the gate is closing, and you’ll never get in.”
‘Zweisamkeit’ is the feeling of being alone even when you’re with other people.”
“You’ve been here, sure. But you’re fundamentally unimportant. If you weren’t here, it would be someone else. You’re a tamer of horses. You’re an NPC, Marx.”
An NPC is a character that is not playable by a gamer. It is an AI extra that gives a programmed world verisimilitude. The NPC can be a best friend, a talking computer, a child, a parent, a lover, a robot, a gruff platoon leader, or the villain. Sam, however, means this as an insult—in addition to calling you unimportant, he’s saying you’re boring and predictable. But the fact is, there is no game without the NPCs.
It is strange, you think, how much people hate going to doctors, but how much they love watching shows about doctors.
The way to turn an ex-lover into a friend is to never stop loving them, to know that when one phase of a relationship ends it can transform into something else. It is to acknowledge that love is both a constant and a variable at the same time.
Tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow, Creeps in this petty pace from day to day, To the last syllable of recorded time; And all our yesterdays have lighted fools The way to dusty death. Out, out, brief candle! Life’s but a walking shadow, a poor player, That struts and frets his hour upon the stage, And then is heard no more. It is a tale Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, Signifying nothing.
“What is a game?” Marx said. “It’s tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow. It’s the possibility of infinite rebirth, infinite redemption. The idea that if you keep playing, you could win. No loss is permanent, because nothing is permanent, ever.”
“And because Mother says Ludo means ‘game’ in Latin.”
How to explain to Destiny that the thing that made her work leap forward in 1996 was that she had been a dervish of selfishness, resentment, and insecurity? Sadie had willed herself to be great: art doesn’t typically get made by happy people.
Sadie was not a natural mother, though this was not a confession one was allowed to make. She craved solitude and personal space too much.
Why wouldn’t you tell someone you loved them? Once you loved someone, you repeated it until they were tired of hearing it. You said it until it ceased to have meaning. Why not? Of course, you goddamn did.
“I’ve been better. I’ve decided…I prefer video game death, all things considered.” “Short, sweet, with the possibility of imminent resurrection,” Sadie said. “Video game characters never die.” “They die all the time, actually. It doesn’t mean the same thing.”
But sometimes, when I’m really low, I keep a particular image in my mind.” “What is it?” “I imagine people playing. Sometimes, it’s one of our games, but sometimes, it’s any game. The thing I find profoundly hopeful when I’m feeling despair is to imagine people playing, to believe that no matter how bad the world gets, there will always be players.”
Maybe it was the willingness to play that hinted at a tender, eternally newborn part in all humans. Maybe it was the willingness to play that kept one from despair.
How quickly you go from being the youngest to the oldest person in a room, she thought.
This generation doesn’t hide anything from anyone. My class talks a lot about their traumas. And how their traumas inform their games. They, honest to God, think their traumas are the most interesting thing about them. I sound like I’m making fun, and I am a little, but I don’t mean to be. They’re so different from us, really. Their standards are higher; they call bullshit on so much of the sexism and racism that I, at least, just lived with. But that’s also made them kind of, well, humorless.
Since she’d started teaching and become a mother, she’d felt old, but that night, she realized she wasn’t old at all. You couldn’t be old and still be wrong about as many things as she’d been wrong about, and it was a kind of immaturity to call yourself old before you were.
“Isn’t that the definition of insanity? Doing the same thing over and over but expecting a different result.” “That’s a game character’s life, too,” Sam said. “The world of infinite restarts. Start again at the beginning, this time you might win.
