Antoine Wilson > Quotes

“and so I opened my eyes and I opened my mind and I saw something I never would have noticed on a bicycle unless I was going very, very fast down a very long hill. Because of the speed of the bus and how I was exerting no effort, the telephone wires on the side of the road, sagging between poles, went up and down with the same rhythm as my heartbeat.”
― Antoine Wilson, Panorama City

“With great freedom comes great responsibility, someone said once, well, it doesn't work the other way around.”
― Antoine Wilson, Panorama City

“O: Are you asleep, mi amor?
C: [no response]
O: There is a spider on your face.
C: [no response]
O: That's a little trick, Juan-George, to make sure someone's really asleep. There's no spider.”
― Antoine Wilson, Panorama City

“...the lighthouse, as a symbol, made no sense. Someone had declared it a Christian beacon of some sort, but a lighthouse wasn't something that led you to a safe harbor, a lighthouse was something that you avoided at all costs, a lighthouse was something you stayed away from lest you and your ship be dashed on the rocks. The most perverse message a lighthouse could ever deliver is come here and be saved.”
― Antoine Wilson, Panorama City

“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

“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

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

“Justice, contrary to public belief, is not blind. Love is blind, but Justice? Look at any statue, at any depiction. She is blindfolded.”
― Antoine Wilson, Panorama City

“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

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

“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

“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

“In the wake of the breakup I was miserable, no real money, no close friends. I was living in a house in the canyons, house-sitting for an actor I knew. Actually, I was house-sitting for an actor who was house-sitting for an actor. I had nothing going on.”
― 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

“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 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

“To artists, he was the lefty son of Klaus, a man who lived by his values, who knew hardship. To himself he was Francis Arsenault, his own invention, ex nihilo.”
― Antoine Wilson, Mouth to Mouth

“Whether this was fashion or indigence was never clear to me.”
― 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

“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

“Stop thinking. From the moment one enters the airport, one is subject to a host of procedures and mechanisms designed to get one from point A to point B. Stop thinking and be the cargo.”
― 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

“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

“Every sighting of this mystery man yielded a frisson, as if he were my guardian angel keeping tabs on me, followed by a pang of anxiety at the thought that I might never see him again.”
― Antoine Wilson, Mouth to Mouth

“Plus he’d put on weight, become more solid in the way so many of us did after college, continuing to grow into manhood long after we thought we’d arrived.”
― 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

“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

“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