Oval Quotes

“It was always the apocalypse,” Laura said. “You guys just didn’t notice until now.”
― Elvia Wilk, Oval

“What did you think?” she asked Michel, smiling.
“You mean that racist shit we just saw?”
Sara raised her eyebrows, signaling that this was out-of-bounds. Only sanctioned critiques, please. “Racist? How so?”
“Snow Yellow?”
“I’m pretty sure it’s a comment on racism, it’s not doing racism.”
“What’s the difference?”
“Um, it’s sort of an interrogation into . . . I don’t know, notions of authenticity in the Western world. Like gestural marks that are meant to—maybe—provide like, a feedback loop into network ecologies of beauties, and like, other ways of interaction conceived as data flows?”
Michel looked at her incredulously and laughed. “Who has done this terrible thing to your speech?”
― Elvia Wilk, Oval

“Intuition was supposed to be a natural, instinctual feeling or desire, but there was really no such thing as instinct. Even what seemed like the deepest inclination was conditioned to some extent by the outside world. Genotype does not determine phenotype. For the physical expression of traits, one has to look to the environment, to circumstance. Nurture determines how nature behaves.”
― Elvia Wilk, Oval

“Men deal with heartbreak by destroying women. Women deal with heartbreak by destroying each other. Don’t fall for it.”
― Elvia Wilk, Oval

“It was no use suggesting to Dam that pursuing Eric was a bad choice. She’d watched Dam do this time and again, and there was no rerouting him from his course of pursuing men whom he despised in order to be abused by them and therefore confirm his assumptions about the world. He was like Sara and Sascha in that way: so sentimental and so in need of care, and yet so incapable of seeking love from a person who could provide it. Unlike Sara and Sascha, though, he was perfectly aware of his own hypocrisy. By seeking compassion in the wrong places, he tried to dull his needs by proving to himself that they were impossible to meet. The satisfaction of rejection was the only kind he seemed to know how to feel.”
― Elvia Wilk, Oval

“Come stai come stai bene bene bene come stai bene bene per l'eternità. Dovevi infilarci così tante cose in quel bene per fargli voler dire qualcosa che non valeva nemmeno la pena pronunciarlo. Meglio levarselo di mezzo il prima possibile. Cmstbn. Bn.”
― Elvia Wilk, Oval

“[...] «È perché fa stare bene, non per fare la cosa giusta.»
«È così che funzionano gli esseri umani. Vanno incentivati. L'impegno morale è sempre egoistico, a un certo livello.»”
― Elvia Wilk, Oval

“[...] si ritrovò comunque circondata da corpi. [...] Sapeva di essere un'aliena. C'erano loro, che occupavano il proprio corpo, e c'era lei, che si agitava all'interno del suo.”
― Elvia Wilk, Oval

“Maybe Dam’s weather service really was, as he insisted, the future of news.”
― Elvia Wilk, Oval

“[…] arguments erupted, not only between those who considered themselves to be the givers and those who had been identified as the takers, but among the givers themselves. Jealousy. Competition. Disagreements about the best ways to do things. Tactics to become the best giver. Tactics to undermine one another’s charity. Tactics to preserve the class of takers so that the class of givers could continue to give.”
― Elvia Wilk, Oval

“It was the same modified, bastardized cartilage that was supposed to have stopped after becoming a roof, but had kept going to become a whole little house, before reversing course and following its own independent trajectory of disintegration. The tiny house: a miniature version of a giant house that had been malfunctioning, on purpose, the whole time she’d lived in it. Their lives on the mountain, she realized, had been just one episode in a long story of planned obsolescence. And then she understood that the symbiotic system of the Berg was not a failure. It was built to fail.”
― Elvia Wilk, Oval

“Dogs: the great leveler. The lowest common denominator of human compassion. The perversity of pampering your dog while the planet is dying. Sloths are nearly extinct, and here we are breeding bulldogs whose rib cages are too small for their lungs. A slave race of our own making. Louis would say all this, bending down happily to pet a collie.”
― Elvia Wilk, Oval

“We think we’re all struggling here in private, unrelated to the identical struggles of people all across the western hemisphere with internet access. Sara thinks she’s living in a unique reality—but she’s actually just reliving season three of The Bachelor.”
― Elvia Wilk, Oval

“A tautology of personality. Anja ran this through her head, standing beside him in line. In her teens, before she'd had real friends, she'd imagined that real friendship meant you didn't have an interior monologue running constantly about your friends—but maybe the interior monologue just got more accurate.”
― Elvia Wilk, Oval

“The woman moved on and Anja looked up to see the man next to her arching his body up to slip his wallet back into the pocket of his slacks. He had produced an offering. The muscles of everyone sitting around them seemed to relax; they had been absolved of responsibility for the time being. He'd taken care of it.”
― Elvia Wilk, Oval

“The Störung was an interruption not because it was commanding or harassing, but because it was so benign yet so unignorable. It fell into the uncanny valley of empathic response. As Louis might say, there was no "specificity" to the struggle, no "human story" compelling you to act. How would Louis react if he were in the subway with her? Had he solved the problem of how to puncture the banal wretchedness of these encounters? Wasn't his solution, Oval, ultimately just an amplified version of tossing change into a cup? It didn't really change the binary nature of the encounter, didn't provide a new option outside the fixed choices: To give or not to give. Oval just compelled you to give more. It didn't resolve the paradox wherein ignoring another's suffering was impossible (that would be inhuman) but fully letting in the awfulness of it was also impossible (because then how could you go on living your ridiculous privileged life?) and so you either plunked some change int he bucket or you averted your eyes just like everyone else as the source of the Störung approached.”
― Elvia Wilk, Oval

“Where did you get this idea that everyone is trying to take advantage of me?"
Anja knew the answer. It was because her mother had been born in America, and so had been born ready to sue anyone, legally or emotionally, at any moment.”
― Elvia Wilk, Oval

“Time passed differently for Mom. She lived inside her own schedule, forgetting the existence of anyone not standing directly in front of her. But when you did cross her field of vision she latched on hard, flipping from absent to overbearing in a second. There was no third mode. Eva had long since learned to avoid speaking to her mother on the phone. Both she and Anja had generally learned to use her father as the go-between, but Anja still gave in, in moments of weakness, reaching out to make sure her mother was still alive.”
― Elvia Wilk, Oval

“But that's the point of Berlin. It's the only chill place left."
"Yeah, but it's over. How can you not see that? These were our Weimar years, and we spent them doing nothing."
"We do things."
"No. We get fucked up, we spend our time in dark rooms, we don't make anything. Protests are basically street parties. When we see the news we watch it through a filter, because none of it's real to us—we cry about it sometimes, but it doesn't really touch us, it's not real, we feel safe. We drink it off and then the badness of our hangovers gives us a good excuse not to do anything the next day. And the whole time things are getting more and more expensive, and people are leaving, and each time we think, how sad, another person has left, but actually it's an exodus now. There's no reason to stay any longer, now that it looks just like the rest of the world. Have you even read about what's been happening on the outside?”
― Elvia Wilk, Oval

“No, she thought, nobody should judge a relationship except for the people in it. Only the participants could understand what existed between them. And after it was formed, the relationship became a fully autonomous, uncontrollable being. People liked to think they were having a relationship with each other, but really they were having a relationship with the relationship itself.”
― Elvia Wilk, Oval

“This place, where they all went together, women and men, to put their bodies into machines, to move in time with music coming from other machines in their eyes, to drink water that they had carried all the way here in little plastic bottles that had been manufactured and shipped from other countries inside machines. They were here to scrunch their muscle groups into painful knots and then to retreat to a dark and hot room where they could mingle their sweat, putting their naked bodies as close to one another as possible without quite touching: no, this place was not a natural place.”
― Elvia Wilk, Oval

“She knew she was an alien. There they were, inhabiting their bodies, and here she was, rocking around inside hers. They knew what their bodies looked like, and they knew what their attitudes toward their bodies looked like—sanctioned variations on confidence and insecurity: this one likes her legs but worries about her lopsided shoulder; this one [...] Anja didn't know how to classify her body, she only knew that whatever it was, it wasn't her fault.”
― Elvia Wilk, Oval

“Mom in particular purported to believe it was caring and responsible to regularly bring up the issue of inheritance—who would get what and when—but to Anja it seemed a transparent desire to induce closeness by invoking death. The desire for connection was always couched in practicality, which was the only vocabulary Mom had access to. Anja knew the strategy worked on her. Mom had had difficulty sounding sympathetic when Anja called to tell her about Pat's death; Anja was sure all her mother was thinking about in that moment was her own. But then, so was Anja.”
― Elvia Wilk, Oval

“She searched her reflexes, and felt the same existential vertigo as when trying to imagine the hormones and chemicals governing her brain's circuitry, or when trying to imagine the scale of the universe in deep time.”
― Elvia Wilk, Oval

“Then she did an inventory of her insides for any evidence that she was planning to cry without her own knowledge. No. All stable. She could let herself be coddled a bit.”
― Elvia Wilk, Oval

“Anja saw this as a cultural inability to recognize phonemes as anything but literal; it was like Newspeak but for pronunciation. Americans believed that letters should act like what they looked like to the American eye, nothing more and nothing less, signifier swallowing signified down it s wide open gullet, the vertical relationship between the sign and its referent rendered entirely irrelevant because the lips and tongue just didn't think it mattered whether the vowel sounds were melted properly.”
― Elvia Wilk, Oval

“I didn't know we were running away from homeless people now," she said when they had landed on the other side.
"What else are we supposed to do? I can't give them anything and I can't deal with the guilt of saying no. It's like the precarious are expected to support the downtrodden in this city. Have you noticed how many bums are around lately?”
― Elvia Wilk, Oval

“A round of girls huddled into the bathroom. Anja had met at least two of them several times but they'd never spoken more than blanks together, blank phrases meaning nothing, signifying nothing except that they knew each other, like Mad Libs for social acquaintance. Anja shook her head. What was the point? Are you having a good night. What did you do earlier. Where are you going later. Blank blank blank.”
― Elvia Wilk, Oval

“Sara and Sascha reliably spoke about events that had happened or were about to happen, with minimal interpretation of those events. The simple fact that events happened and that Sara and/or Sascha knew about them was their reason for having conversations at all. The secondary goal was to create a constant strain of anxiety on your part (and possibly on each other's part) that there could ever be something happening to which you were not privy. Left unchecked, they could carry on forever with preemptive or retroactive scheduling talk, especially if you let on that it made you uncomfortable.”
― Elvia Wilk, Oval

“She could let him spin his hands in the air, drawing loops around concepts, following his own train of thought while she drew new loops silently on her own. Eventually he would return to base camp and she'd be able to decipher why he'd gone where he'd gone. The route was new each time—that was why she went along with it—butt the method of leaving in order to return was so predictable, and so inefficient.
For the first time, she felt acutely annoyed that Louis had to leave himself in order to return to himself. If he could articulate the world, he should also be able to directly articulate his own being. Otherwise, what was the point of all that traveling in circles?”
― Elvia Wilk, Oval