- Children frighten me. I mean, I appreciate them on a cute aesthetic level, but they're very demanding and unreasonable creatures and often smell funny. I can't believe I ever was one.
- I want to believe there is a somebody out there just for me. I want to believe that I exist to be there for that somebody.
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- We believe in the wrong things, I wrote, using the same pen Boomer had used on his arm. That's what frustrates me the most. Not the lack of belief, but the belief in the wrong things. You want meaning? Well, the meanings are out there. We're just so damn good at reading them wrong.
- I wanted to stop there. But I went on.
- It's not going to be explained to you in a prayer. And I'm not going to be able to explain it to you. Not just because I'm as ignorant and hopeful and selectively blind as the next guy, but because I don't think meaning is something that can be explained. You have to understand it on your own. It's like when you're starting to read. First, you learn the letters. Then, once you know what sounds the letters make, you use them to sound out words. You know that c-a-t leads to cat and d-o-g leads to dog. But then you have to make that extra leap, to understand that the word, the sound, the "cat" is connected to an actual cat, and that "dog" is connected to an actual dog. It's that leap, that understanding, that leads to meaning. ANd a lot of the time in life, we're still just sounding things out. We know the sentences and how to say them. We know the ideas and how to present them. We know the prayers and which words to say in what order. But that's only spelling.
- I don't mean this to sound hopeless. Because in the same way that a kid can realize what "c-a-t" means, I think we can find the truths that live behind our words. I wish I could remember the moment when I was a kid and I discovered that the letters linked into words, and that the words linked to real things. What a revelation that must have been. We don't have the words for it, since we hadn't yet learned the words. It must have been astonishing, to be given the key to the kingdom and see it turn in our hands so easily.
- Too much. Too soon. Too fast. I put down the notebook, paced around the apartment. The world was too full of wastrels and waifs, sycophants and spies—all of whom put words to the wrong use, who made everything that was said or written suspect.
- It's hard to answer a question you haven't been asked. It's hard to show that you tried unless you end up succeeding.
- Maybe, I thought, it,'s not distance that's the problem, but how you handle it.
- It was like the full amount of time we'd been apart was falling between each sentence. There, on the front stoop, it was months of us looking at each other. Her hair was longer, her skin a little darker. And there was something else, too. I just couldn't figure it out. It was something in her eyes. Something in the way she was looking at me that wasn't like the way she'd looked at me before.
- Why is it so much easier to talk to a stranger? Why do we feel we need that disconnect in order to connect?
sep 2 2013 ∞
sep 3 2013 +
sep 3 2013 +