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

“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

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

“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

“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

“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

“The things that had seemed so irresistible to her—Garrett’s tragic sadness, his distrust of pieties, his gimlet-eyed way of looking at the whole American project—were less alluring when you had to live with them on a daily basis. Nonconformity, when you’re married to it, ends up looking more and more like inertia. And yet there were surprising compensations: she would never, for example, have imagined him being such a good father.”
― Eric Puchner, Dream State

“But boringness, it seemed to Cece more and more, was a luxury item, available only to the rich.”
― Eric Puchner, Dream State

“Here we go again.” “ ‘The longest sentence you can form with two words is I do.’ ”
― Eric Puchner, Dream State

“If you look for a meaning, Tarkovsky once said, you’ll miss everything that happens.”
― Eric Puchner, Dream State

“Lana felt sick inside. It wasn’t a normal sick, but the way you might feel after visiting someone in the hospital, realizing they were worse off than you’d imagined.”
― Eric Puchner, Dream State

“Attachment was the root of suffering.”
― Eric Puchner, Dream State

“but wasn’t that the whole purpose of time? To spend it? Charlie liked having the currency to spend, even to waste, but he also felt lost and a bit freaked out by its abundance, as if he’d inherited something that wasn’t his.”
― Eric Puchner, Dream State

“As soon as you started to admire something, to love it, you spelled its doom.”
― Eric Puchner, Dream State

“search”
― Eric Puchner, Dream State

“She’d always imagined she was special, destined to do something original with her life, maybe even become someone great, and this, ironically, was what had drawn her to Garrett in the first place. Running away with him, as far as she’d thought about it consciously, was meant to be part of this becoming. And yet what had she become?”
― Eric Puchner, Dream State

“He and Charlie swam out twenty or thirty yards from the dock, then flipped onto their backs so that they were floating side by side, their ears corked with water. The music disappeared, replaced by the infinite silence of the lake. He couldn’t see Charlie but knew he was listening to the bottomless silence too. It contained Elias, Garrett’s grief, everything they would ever need to say to each other. They floated on top of it, like debris from a wreck. They’d found each other again. The sky bristled with stars. If only this could be his wedding speech. A wedding silence, with their whole lives cradling them.”
― Eric Puchner, Dream State