luce (cry baby) > Books: 5-so-so-reads‎ (674)

“I won't introduce you to my father, not personally, not yet. Changes are you already know him.”

“I won't introduce you to my father, not personally, not yet. Changes are you already know him.”

“Honesty comes in an infinite variety, none crueler than a teenager's tedium.”

“I won't introduce you to my father, not personally, not yet. Changes are you already know him.”

“Honesty comes in an infinite variety, none crueler than a teenager's tedium.”

“Had Harold Pardee killed his wife? In hair salons, at lunch counters, the question was posed. Such a death, in Bake

“Had Harold Pardee killed his wife? In hair salons, at lunch counters, the question was posed. Such a death, in Bakerton, was without precedent.”

“In Bakerton a murder would not have been forgotten. The local memory was a powerful tool, an instrument so sensitive it recalled events that hadn't actually occurred.
Conscious of its new status as a place where things happened Bakerton cleared its throat and commenced speculating.”

“Had Harold Pardee killed his wife? In hair salons, at lunch counters, the question was posed. Such a death, in Bakerton, was without precedent.”

“In Bakerton a murder would not have been forgotten. The local memory was a powerful tool, an instrument so sensitive it recalled events that hadn't actually occurred.
Conscious of its new status as a place where things happened Bakerton cleared its throat and commenced speculating.”

“Why am I here? he asks himself. What am I doing?”

“Why am I here? he asks himself. What am I doing?”

“Scott was so much trouble, whatever the reason was. A beautiful disaster.”

“Even then, ha he would endlessly be a curiosity and not a person. He would forget this was true and then be reminded this way, this he most recent in the jarring series of moments that threaded thorough his whole life in America. When did it end? When would they all just get used to him—to all of them?”

“Why am I here? he asks himself. What am I doing?”

“Scott was so much trouble, whatever the reason was. A beautiful disaster.”

“Even then, ha he would endlessly be a curiosity and not a person. He would forget this was true and then be reminded this way, this he most recent in the jarring series of moments that threaded thorough his whole life in America. When did it end? When would they all just get used to him—to all of them?”

“Once upon a time, there was a girl with a vivid imagination, one who was not entirely

“Once upon a time, there was a girl with a vivid imagination, one who was not entirely sane. She was afraid of many things that weren’t real, but she didn’t tell anyone. They would’ve sent her far, far away, and she wasn’t ready to go.”

“Everything about him was precious. When it came to my oshi, I wanted to off

“Everything about him was precious. When it came to my oshi, I wanted to offer him everything I had.”

“It seemed to me that in this confluence of cultures, we had acquired one another’s su

“It seemed to me that in this confluence of cultures, we had acquired one another’s superstitions without necessarily any of their comforts.”

“The town of Malacca was very still, dreaming under the tropical sun of its past glories, when it was the pearl of port cities along the Straits.”

“The hours, days, and years that had bled away in his opium haze demanded a payment from my future.”

“[T]o marry the living to the dead was a rare and, indeed, dreadful occurrence.”

“Life was full of such moments, the self momentarily exposed. What he and all the other people on this site were doing was harvesting such moments, no

“Life was full of such moments, the self momentarily exposed. What he and all the other people on this site were doing was harvesting such moments, not through happenstance or spontaneity but using some apparatus of mass production.”

“These sundry interruptions and redactions, all the skirmishes and misdirection. Like a dog finally catching its tail and chewing it down to the gristle.”

“But no one had a happy childhood. No one had a good life. Human pain existed in a vast supply, and people took from it like grain from a barn. There was pain for you and pain for you and pain for you— agony enough for everyone. The pain of his childhood was of such a common source that it embarrassed him. Perhaps it was this that he resented in the work of his peers. It wasn’t that their lives were worse than his or that his life was better than theirs— it was that they all had the same pain , the same hurt, and he didn’t think anyone should go around pretending it was something more than it was: the routine operation of the universe. Small, common things— hurt feelings, cruel parents, strange and wearisome troubles.”

“Loving people was hard. It was difficult sometimes to believe that they were good. It was hard to know them. But that didn’t mean you could just go on without trying. What he believed was that love was more than just kindness and more than just giving people the things they wanted. Love was more than the parts of it that were easy and pleasurable. Sometimes love was trying to understand. Love was trying to get beyond what was hard. Love, love, love.”