“It was April 1990, not even four months into the new decade, and already Nelson Mandela had been freed and Daniel Ortega defeated and the first McDonald’s opened in the USSR, which was about to drift apart, ending the Cold War, and still, although increasingly people chose to ignore this, everything was awful when it came down to inequality and Earth destruction and generally being fucked by capitalism.”
“In a land without bananas, the village awoke to nine banana crates, each containing the severed head of one of its sons.”
“When our marriage ended, I told Seth it was because we had too many White People conversations.”
“Across the street is a KFC. I see a lot of young people with motorbike helmets tucked under their arms go in there, pushing the glass doors inward and letting out a blast of air-conditioned air.”
“I had to go to Belgrade to give a couple of lectures, and Charles was unable to travel with me. I am a literary figure, but might have preferred to be an architect. I have a strong sense of space, I am touching my heart at this very moment.”
“Brett was crashing with me while he was on the lam after sucker-punching a Republican. You probably think harboring a fugitive is exciting, but it’s not half as thrilling as it sounds.”
“When Lane comes out of the gas station store, the dog is waiting for him. It sits in the dusty crossroads, alert and eager, ears pricked and black tongue stiff between its panting jaws.”
“The English language has over five hundred thousand words, but John didn’t say a word all the way home.”
“We awoke one morning to news of a death. The person we had lost was the one we used to call the Village Idiot—that buffoon who used to make us laugh and cry at the same time, that leaping, dancing ball of energy who would hurl himself around, wild with enthusiasm, stomping on our toes and crashing into us as he went gesticulating by.”
“Two essential things,” he said. “Always keep your stick on the ice and always keep your legs moving.”
“When I was five years old, back when my old man was still sort of around, I watched a promotional video for Disneyland that my mom got in the free box of VHS tapes at the library.”
“A week after the Wal-Mart incident, we were all hanging out at their apartment in the evening. Frankie was making dinner, the baby was napping. Matt and I sat on the couch, alone for the first time.”
“I had to do something new. My way of operating was not so old yet I seemed to have forgotten how to do anything else.”
“There was a young woman sitting in the bar. Her name was Pearl. She was drinking gin and tonics and she held an infant in the crook of her right arm.”
" What had been happening in Diedre’s life prior to the summer of 1985, the month of July, when he drove up to the Shell where she worked in his 1976 green Ford Pinto, dressed in resort-owner pants and a guayabera, pupils massive behind a pair of expensive-looking Ray-Bans?”
“It’ll take you a long time to talk about martial law, and you’ll never talk about it with anyone who lived through it with you. But for now, you don’t go to the rallies, you don’t join the student protests; you go silent or change the subject when someone at your table in the canteen brings it up.”
“Anita is sitting, or rather crouching, hugging her upraised legs, head lowered, forehead resting on her knees, inhaling her own warm vanilla scent.”
“A few years ago, following the modest success of a book I had edited, I was invited to give a series of lectures at a university in a small and somewhat remote city in central Europe which I shall not name.”
“Mother says: Life is made like string. We need to braid it until we can no longer distinguish its threads from our fingers.”
“I first read part of the novel À la recherche du temps perdu, translated into English by C. K. Scott Moncrieff, in January 1961, when I was aged a few weeks less than twenty-two years. What I read at that time was a single paperback volume with the title Swann’s Way.”
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