"They call us revenants, those who return. Restless for this world, we pass each other in mute recognition, for to be silent and solitary is our essential condition. But death doesn’t end our thirst for a human touch, a human voice calling our name."
"They enter the city proper at Cripplegate and walk south down Little Wood Street. It seems to George like any other London day. The Walloons are sitting in a semicircle waiting to be shaved at the sign of the Pheasant. A dirty ragamuffin with a tame squirrel sitting on his shoulder is begging for money. At the corner of Silver Street a woman throws water over a vagrant lying beside her front door. He seems untroubled so she hits him with the bucket and still gets no reaction. It is entirely possible that he is dead."
"I wore red capris on the plane. After I’d resolved to go to you, I couldn’t imagine wearing anything else. The red made me feel bold, like a matador. I hadn’t been able to sleep the night before, and it was still dark when I’d risen from bed and stuffed my suitcase with summer clothing. Despite my fevered state, I’d had the presence of mind to fill my backpack with old photographs, graphite and ink, and the best of my drawings."
"Here is my impression of a play: Okay, so first you gotta imagine it’s a hotel room, right? Just a normal, boring-looking hotel room, on the nice end of things, as far as hotel rooms go. And the audience is coming in, and they’re taking their seats in this dinky little theater in lower Manhattan, barely bigger than a Winnebago, this theater, with seats that feel like someone just glued down some thin fabric over a block of hard metal. The main thing of a theater—like the whole point of it—is that there’s going to be a lot of sitting in it, so you’d think they would at least consider investing in some comfortable chairs. Word to the wise: if they can’t even get that part right, which absolutely most of the time they cannot, then buckle the fuck up, because I can tell you right now you are in for an ordeal of an evening."
"I was born in this city. Amsterdam, of course, is not a real city, except in the eyes of people from outside. We, the ones who were born here, immediately recognize the provincial from the way he moves, the way he walks, the way he holds his head. The man from the provinces who thinks he’s ended up in a real city. He walks as though he were in Paris or Rome. He admires his reflection in the store windows and congratulates himself on his decision to exchange his provincial life for a stay in this city, which is not a real city at all."
"Friday to Monday was an Oval-shaped binge. Their pupils were Ovals, their kidneys elongated themselves into Ovals, all the loose change in their pockets melted into Ovals and spent itself, serotonin molecules morphed into large and bubbly Ovals, Oval sperm jetted from Oval testicles through vaginal canal toward ovarian Ovals. Anja dubbed Louis “The Giver” and together they spent a thousand euros, at least, in forty-eight hours. Most surprising of all, Anja thought, was that her knowledge of the artificial nature of her instincts to spend, to give, and to love during those hours in no way dampened the urges to do those things. Far from detracting from their validity, her knowledge that her feelings were chemically induced by Oval even lent a certain righteousness to her acting upon them, a feeling of fully justified liberation."
"We call them Bunnies because that is what they call each other. Seriously. Bunny. Example: Hi, Bunny! Hi, Bunny! What did you do last night, Bunny? I hung out with you, Bunny. Remember, Bunny? That’s right, Bunny, you hung out with me and it was the best time I ever had. Bunny, I love you. I love you, Bunny."
"There are villages that smell of misfortune. You just have to breathe in their air to recognize them, air that is murky and thin and defeated, like all things that have failed."
"I’ve taken a job at a little clothing store downtown. Just a couple of day shifts during the week. If the art class at Ed’s institution actually happens, I can easily work around it.He doesn’t know I’m working, and I see no reason to tell him. He would see it as lowly, as he did my job at Sally’s back home, and I don’t want to have to defend what I love about working in a shop. I tried to explain it for two full years, and he never saw my work as anything more than a waste of time. “We don’t need the money,” he’d argue. “You should be home painting.”"
"Otis Lee had tried to steer Knot, just as he had tried to steer his older sister, Essie, who had left home to go north. She was in New York passing for white. Who Essie’s white father was, Otis Lee never knew, and he didn’t care. He had known his own father and he still missed him dearly. He’d drowned in the canal when Otis Lee was a child."
"It seems to me now, as I look back, that my sister was never entirely tame. When we were children, Robin often disappeared for an hour, an afternoon, a day. Our mother, who was rarely home, didn’t notice, but I was bothered by these absences. I nursed a passion for regularity; I craved fixed mealtimes and weekday routines. Every Wednesday I went to the pizza parlor down the block from our apartment and, using the crinkled bills our mother left scattered on the counter, bought a pizza, carried it home in a white box loose-bottomed with grease, and waited. I only did this on Wednesdays. On Tuesdays my class had library time and on Thursdays we had art. I liked the library and art, but I loved knowing what was coming next."
"Guys at our high school baited gator. Brynn didn’t like it, but she usually tagged along, which meant that I’d go too. They brought cases of cheap beer and built bonfires out of old Christmas trees down at the river, which ran about forty minutes away from our neighborhood. We’d carpool out in all the boys’ shitty cars with no air-conditioning, struggling souped-up engines, windows rolled down until we were nearly coated in condensation."
"Just two years shy of 30, Patsy has nothing to show for it besides the flimsy brown envelope that she uses to shade herself from the white-hot glare of the sun. The envelope contains all her papers—from birth certificate to vaccination records. But most importantly, it carries her dream, a dream every Jamaican of a certain social ranking shares: boarding an airplane to America. For the destination, and for the ability to fly."
"At an abandoned building’s fence, we sat on old ashes and traded banter. we gathered supplies on torn glossy pages between our splayed legs. The pages were brochures from American colleges mailed free of charge upon request. The brochures showed students smiling and holding folders close to their chests or sitting with legs crossed on stone benches, lecture halls with semicircular tiers, beautiful young ladies playing handball on well-manicured turf."
"Preamble (draft) How can I write what happened? (This “how” kept me up at night for many years.) And how can what I write escape the traps of distortion and domination of official history? I realize there’s something paradoxical and ironic about it. Is it reasonable to worry about the fate of what I write before my pen even begins to bleed ink onto paper?"
"Having smoked and drunk again, counted the glasses and my cigarettes, saving two for today, as there are three days left till Monday, without Ivan. Sixty cigarettes later, however, Ivan is back in Vienna, first he’ll call the time service to check his watch, then dial 00 for the wakeup service, which phones right back, immediately thereafter he’ll fell asleep as quickly as he alone can do, then he’ll wake up (with the service) in a grumpy mood he always expresses in different ways using sighs, curses, tantrums, complaints."
"The story goes that in my family there’s an extra dinner guest at every meal. He’s invisible, but always there. He has a plate, glass, knife and fork. Every so often he appears, casts his shadow over the table and erases one of those present. The first to vanish was my grandfather."
"The key to successful technology consists of convincing addicts that the future’s heart beats within it, that its mere existence entails the inexorable dissolution of their enemies. In principle, its users are born different from one another, but soon they begin to resemble one another so much that in the end they cease to exist as individuals. Only by collaborating with the invasion can they survive."
"In an account sent to the Philosophical Transactions but for some reason never published there, or anywhere else, a young G. W. Leibniz, who throughout his life was an assiduous inquirer into miracles and other aberrations of nature, related the odd and troubling encounter he had with a certain astronomer who’d predicted that at noon on the last day of June 1666, the brightest time of day at nearly the brightest time of year, the Moon would pass very briefly, but very precisely, be-tween the Sun and the Earth, casting all of Europe for one instant in absolute darkness, “a darkness without equal in our history, but lasting no longer than four seconds,” the astronomer predicted, according to Leibniz, an eclipse that no other astronomer in Europe was predicting, and which, Leibniz explained, drew his notice in part because the astronomer in question, whose observations of the planets and the fixed stars were supposedly among the most accurate and the most precise ever made, superior to Tycho’s, was blind, and “not merely completely blind,” Leibniz wrote (in my translation from the Latin), “but in fact entirely without eyes.”"
"December 31, 2008. All too often paper hats are involved. Other things about New Year’s Eve that mortify Bunny are false gaiety, mandatory fun and that song, the one that’s like the summer camp song. Not “Kumbaya,” but that other summer camp song, the secular one, where everyone links arms and they sway as they sing, “Friends, friends, friends, we will always be.” It’s not that song either, but the New Year’s Eve song also requires arm linking and swaying and it sentimentalizes friendship with an excessive sweetness that is something like the grotesquerie of baby chicks dyed pink for Easter."
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