Among the Missing Quotes

“It doesn't matter what you do. In the end, you are going to be judged, and all the times that you're not at your most dignified are the ones that will be recalled in all their vivid, heartbreaking detail. And then of course these things will be distorted and exaggerated and replayed over and over, until eventually they turn into the essence of you: your cartoon.”
― Dan Chaon, Among the Missing

“You can go on like this for a very long time, and no one will notice. You keep thinking you're going to hit some sort of bottom, but I'm here to tell you: There is no bottom. ”
― Dan Chaon, Among the Missing

“There are so many people we could become, and we leave such a trail of bodies through our teens and twenties that it's hard to tell which one is us. How many versions do we abandon over the years?”
― Dan Chaon, Among the Missing

“What if you believed that everything in life was like a prize? What if you thought of the world as a big random drawing, and you were always winning things, the world offering them up with a big grin, like an emcee's: Here you go, Hollis. Here is a motorcycle. Here is a little boy who loves you. Here is a weird experience, here is something bad that you should mull over because it will make you a better person. What if you could think that life was this free vacation you'd won, and you won just because you happened to be alive?”
― Dan Chaon, Among the Missing

“We leave such a trail of bodies through our teens and twenties that it's hard to tell which one is us. How many versions do we abandon over the years”
― Dan Chaon, Among the Missing

“In the end, there probably isn't much difference between being in love and acting like you're in love. ”
― Dan Chaon, Among the Missing

“It's not like it ruined my life, I was going to say, but then I didn't. Because it occurred to me that maybe it had ruined my life, in a kind of quiet way--a little lie, probably not so vital, insidiously separating me from everyone I loved. ”
― Dan Chaon, Among the Missing

“As her husband held her close, she could feel the pulse of other choices, other lives, opening up beneath her. Her past crackled behind her like a terrible lightning, branches and branches, endless, and then nothing.”
― Dan Chaon, Among the Missing

“If no one knows you, then you are no one.”
― Dan Chaon, Among the Missing

“That night I sat up writing in my diary writing to Big Me: 'I hope you are alive ' I wrote. 'I hope that I don't die before you are able to read this.”
― Dan Chaon, Among the Missing

“Maybe love, like suffering, is relative. ”
― Dan Chaon, Among the Missing

“She looked at me as if I might be one of them a spy from the world of the ignorant.”
― Dan Chaon, Among the Missing

“In these journals I would frequently write messages to myself, a person whom I addressed as Big Me, or The Future Me. Rereading these entries as the addressee, I try not to be insulted, since my former self admonishes me frequently. "I hope you are not a failure," he says. "I hope you are happy," he says.”
― Dan Chaon, Among the Missing

“The nurse was not much older than he—a short, stocky girl who wore her hair in a way that made him think maybe she’d had an unhappy childhood.”
― Dan Chaon, Among the Missing