Mouth to Mouth Quotes

“I say ‘told myself’ because—and this became clearer to me later, I didn’t know this back then, I wasn’t wise to it—to put it bluntly, we never really know why we do what we do. The part of our brains tasked with generating reasons doesn’t care about truth… only plausibility.”
― Antoine Wilson, Mouth to Mouth

“He’d dethroned the king, married the princess, and taken over the kingdom. Did he really expect me to believe he’d done so ingenuously, blundering forward with a heart full of the best intentions? I think he did. What was more, in that moment at least, he seemed to believe it himself.”
― Antoine Wilson, Mouth to Mouth

“There is no more powerful skill for success in any field than knowing how to ask the right questions.”
― Antoine Wilson, Mouth to Mouth

“A relationship needs its games. If there is no sense of play, there is only desperation, the fear of being alone.”
― Antoine Wilson, Mouth to Mouth

“He had undergone surgery recently, nothing serious, or not life-threatening at least, but he had ended up terrified that he wouldn’t wake up again. It did happen to people. And though such accidents had become exceedingly rare, he couldn’t help but imagine his going to sleep and never waking up, what it would do to his children—he had two as well—and to his wife. The whole episode had disturbed him greatly. “Sleep is the cousin of death,” I said.”
― Antoine Wilson, Mouth to Mouth

“Sleep is the cousin of death,” I said.”
― Antoine Wilson, Mouth to Mouth

“You listened so patiently. I suppose I want to know. What do you think?
You did what anyone would have done, I said.
It was the closest thing to a benediction I could offer. The fact that I didn't think it true, didn't make a difference.”
― Antoine Wilson, Mouth to Mouth

“and thanked me for listening to his story. Now it's yours. It's out there. Do with it what you will. There it was. He wanted me to write it. I had no intention of doing so.”
― Antoine Wilson, Mouth to Mouth

“Frances had pegged Jeff as a computer whiz and Jeff did little to disabuse him of that notion. His newly acquired knowledge of Microsoft Excel had catapulted him to database wizard status and he went about making himself indispensable.”
― Antoine Wilson, Mouth to Mouth

“The art is only the glue. It’s not always just glue, obviously. Sometimes it’s capital-A art. But for the most part, the work, from the perspective of the art world, exists to provide an occasion for buying and selling, for socializing, for crowing, for telegraphing taste, for cleaning up dirty money.”
― Antoine Wilson, Mouth to Mouth

“Francis ascended the stairs without slowing, calling for Marcus and Andrea before he’d reached the top. Then he was gone. If he’d clocked Jeff at all, it was only to verify that someone was behind the desk.”
― Antoine Wilson, Mouth to Mouth

“He wondered what could have possibly happened with his predecessor to make her cross the street in tears. Had it been him they would have been tears of boredom. He remembered what his mother had told him when he was a child: “Waiting is doing what you don’t want until you get to do what you want.” He would bide his time in the new sinecure, waiting for Francis.”
― Antoine Wilson, Mouth to Mouth

“the smile she presented me with betrayed no frustration, no sense of victory or defeat, no sign of the miniature drama I’d just witnessed, and, most significantly, no invitation to share in camaraderie. It was as if the entire past had been wiped away and this moment, her smile, and her chipper “How can I help you?” might as well have been the big bang. I pulled the boarding pass from my pocket and asked about the flight. She glanced at it, typed into her terminal, its keys going clackety-clack, and as she read the screen she pursed her lips at what could not have been good news. “The delay is ongoing,” she said, “but they could clear it at any time.” I asked if she knew the cause. “Eyjafjallajökull,” she said with perfect facility. “It is acting up again. They say it won’t be as bad as April, but who can tell?” I was still trying to untangle the first word. “The volcano,” she said. Her eyes betrayed a glimmer of amusement, a perverse delight at the vicissitudes of travel, the things-which-cannot-be-changed, the fates assigned to us by the same gods who abandoned us long ago. It was the spark we see in the eyes of the patrolman shutting down the snowy pass, the local who tells you that you can’t get there from here, the mechanic who informs you that you’re not going anywhere today. She said she would be sure to make an announcement when she heard anything else. With that, our interaction was over. She reset herself for the person waiting behind me.”
― Antoine Wilson, Mouth to Mouth

“What about the way he tried to raise his arm while looking at Jeff? Did he remember that? What had he been trying to do? Signal? Beckon? Acknowledge? Thank? Even if everything that had happened at the beach was a blur, or a blank, Jeff had no doubt that somewhere in that man lingered a remnant of that canceled gesture.”
― Antoine Wilson, Mouth to Mouth

“There is no more powerful skill for success in any field than knowing how to ask the right questions. A painter, for example, might be working on a body of work, asking, “Is it beautiful? Is it beautiful?” and that might be, unbeknownst to him, the wrong question. He might go completely astray in search of a quality that has nothing at all to do with where the work should be going.”
― Antoine Wilson, Mouth to Mouth

“Naturally, nobody mentioned his infidelities, his treachery, his tendency toward domination and humiliation, his utterly mercenary approach to most art, his yelling, his firing people on a whim, his inability to or lack of desire to recognize the inner lives of others, his avarice, his all-around tendency to make”
― Antoine Wilson, Mouth to Mouth

“Something the doctors hadn’t been able to figure out earlier, because, he found out later, Francis hadn’t divulged to them his habitual cocaine use.”
― Antoine Wilson, Mouth to Mouth

“And then there’s the matter of the show. Did he promise her a show? Is this how the gallery works? Is this how he and my mom got together in the first place? How many women has he done this to? His eye, his eye, everybody’s always talking about his eye. But is it an eye for art or for ass?”
― Antoine Wilson, Mouth to Mouth

“And she is older, in my defense, the way Alison goes on you’d think I’d been fucking an undergraduate. In any case, once Astrid and I had established relations, I understood that they might cross paths, so we were exceptionally discreet about our . . . connection.”
― Antoine Wilson, Mouth to Mouth

“love my wife,” Francis said. “I love her deeply. I wouldn’t be the man I am without her.” He shifted in his chair. “That said, were she to leave me, as she has the right to, not to mention the reason, I could bear the absence of her affections.”
― Antoine Wilson, Mouth to Mouth

“She certainly carried that arrogance with her at dinner, and again when she dropped off the transparencies. He was surprised to hear that she’d crumbled so publicly, but then again, those kinds of people were often more fragile than they seemed. Harder, but more brittle.”
― Antoine Wilson, Mouth to Mouth

“Money sloshed around via wire, and artworks of dubious provenance moved from collector to collector trailed by 1031 like-kind exchange tax forms, deferring taxes even as the work appreciated, or so Jeff understood, when Fiona explained it.”
― Antoine Wilson, Mouth to Mouth

“Jeff sensed that he’d risen, that he was no longer someone who could be inconsequentially ignored. He sensed, too, that he was perceived as an opportunist and a carpetbagger.”
― Antoine Wilson, Mouth to Mouth

“One of those pretty boys we put up front to avoid being accused of only putting pretty girls up there.”
― Antoine Wilson, Mouth to Mouth

“Our relationship developed under a cloud of paranoia. We ordered in rather than going out. When we did meet out in the world, we avoided anywhere that we might bump into anyone we knew. This might have seemed like overkill, but it was also fun, one of the games we played.”
― Antoine Wilson, Mouth to Mouth

“I had an ex like that. Wasn’t happy unless my head was full of her words.”
― Antoine Wilson, Mouth to Mouth

“Based on what I’d heard thus far, I could have easily and justifiably accused Jeff of stalking Francis Arsenault.”
― Antoine Wilson, Mouth to Mouth

“It was seductive, the machine. Enchanting. He couldn’t help but be swayed and impressed.”
― Antoine Wilson, Mouth to Mouth

“Was this what it meant to have the eye? To be able to discern a distinction in quality so subtle as to be invisible to the man on the street?”
― Antoine Wilson, Mouth to Mouth

“We’ve got a gallery here, in Chelsea. Plus London and Berlin. That’s why I’m trying to get to Germany. For an opening.”
― Antoine Wilson, Mouth to Mouth