Dream State Quotes

“She thought of the verse from Genesis she’d memorized in Sunday school, the one that had struck a gong of terror in her heart. And the earth was without form, and void, and darkness was upon the face of the deep. How could she still remember this, and not the word after “house” and “apple”? It wasn’t death that scared her so much as oblivion, the face of the deep, that missing word that she’d never retrieve. One after another, the words going poof. Not a sudden death, but a gradual one, an accretion of losses, one you were in denial about until it was too late, the way the ptarmigans and butterflies had vanished somehow without her even noticing. Maybe the world had it too: a memory problem. The density of its ideas was in freefall. She and the earth were in this together.”
― Eric Puchner, Dream State

“Maybe marriage was like that. Gradually you renamed the world and created a new one, one only you could enter. You turned flowers into money, took the lullaby of unexciting days and called it happiness.”
― Eric Puchner, Dream State

“If the world was ending, the last thing Cece wanted to do was talk about it all the time. She wanted, sometimes, to chat about movies. To feel flattered and adored. To be selfish and alive and not give a shit.”
― Eric Puchner, Dream State

“She'd been unhappy for so long, her mother. Though Lana was beginning to think it wasn't unhappiness her mother suffered from so much as happiness, or at least an idea of it that didn't exist. If she admitted to being happy, what would she aspire to anymore?”
― Eric Puchner, Dream State

“How strange it was to be old. The events that had seemed so important to Garrett seemed shamefully distant, even a little ridiculous, like the plot of a movie he’d once thought profound.”
― Eric Puchner, Dream State

“Life was a long, incompetent search to get back to a feeling you had when you were six.”
― Eric Puchner, Dream State

“Another fascist prick here in the States, riding the migrant crisis to power? Everyone knew these things would happen, smart people had been predicting them for years, and yet the world—or at least the assholes running it—seemed uninterested in stopping them.”
― Eric Puchner, Dream State

“He had a pathological need to cheer her up. To make her laugh. It was not the opposite of fear but its demented companion. It was marriage.”
― Eric Puchner, Dream State

“Marriage, the only adventure open to the cowardly.”
― Eric Puchner, Dream State

“This was the life. This one. It was precious, this certainty, because she knew it wouldn't last.”
― Eric Puchner, Dream State

“If you look for a meaning”
― Eric Puchner, Dream State

“Cece often felt guilty for feeling happy—or whatever you wanted to call it—given the state of things. You couldn’t read The New York Times without despairing at the latest drastic revelation and also somehow feeling like it was redundant”
― Eric Puchner, Dream State

“Cece looked at him: a bit sadly, a bit happily. Never one without the other. If she had been a simpler person, easier to love, probably he would have been bored a long time ago.”
― Eric Puchner, Dream State

“The worry and boredom and confinement were unspeakable. It was the sort of ordeal that sweeps you out to sea and then crashes you back to shore half a year later”
― Eric Puchner, Dream State

“the way you hoped old friends from different phases of your life would get along and make it seem like the moon”
― Eric Puchner, Dream State

“A photo turns ugly things beautiful and beautiful things ugly.”
― Eric Puchner, Dream State

“Not that Cece didn't love Garrett. She did! Just that this love failed to solve their problems.”
― Eric Puchner, Dream State

“The sunset was outlandishly beautiful”
― Eric Puchner, Dream State

“She’d been unhappy for so long”
― Eric Puchner, Dream State

“There was the song of your life and then there was the mondegreen of it”
― Eric Puchner, Dream State

“It terrified him”
― Eric Puchner, Dream State

“So who was it that first stopped in their tracks at the sight of a sunrise? Thought”
― Eric Puchner, Dream State

“What if his whole belief system was just”
― Eric Puchner, Dream State

“Photos make beautiful things uglier and more boring,” he said. “And ugly things less ugly and more interesting.”
― Eric Puchner, Dream State

“Something about the words themselves—“pediatric neurosurgeon”—had appealed to her”
― Eric Puchner, Dream State

“The answer to that particular question—‘What could I do”
― Eric Puchner, Dream State

“he was on a plane, and I was left behind in some shit airport. And it kind of made sense to me. Like here we all are, waiting for our flights. A layover. It’s not actually where we belong at all.”
― Eric Puchner, Dream State

“You’re shoulding on yourself again,” Babs said. “If you’re doing something out of obligation, not because you want to, you start to resent yourself, others, the whole idea of staying clean. We know what that leads to, right?”
― Eric Puchner, Dream State

“Her brain was in constant rebellion, but her heart was still an obedient organ that craved her parents’ approval.”
― Eric Puchner, Dream State

“Some ancestral hillbilly possessed her when her kale was threatened.”
― Eric Puchner, Dream State