Tess Hallman

“It made me think that everything was about to arrive--the moment when you know all and everything is decided forever.”
― Jack Kerouac, On the Road

“It was curious, later, to think of how easily I fell into things. If there were drugs around, I did them. You were in the moment--when everything back then happened. We could talk about the moment for hours. Turn it over in conversation: the way the light moved, why someone was silent, dismantling all the layers of what a look really meant. It seemed like something important, our desire to describe the shape of each second as it passed, to bring out everything hidden and beat it to death.”
― Emma Cline, The Girls

“Anyway, we may all just bee atoms in the void, but according to quantum mechanics, no object objectively exist at all, in the void or otherwise. Particles have no inherent values, only probabilities, and they only materialize when they are measured--which means that on a quantum level, reality simply isn't there unless we're looking directly at it. If a tree falls in the forest and no one is there to hear it, there is no tree, and no forest. Is it any different if that tree was once a girl? I think it is not.”
― Emily Temple, The Lightness

“But most of all, I remember space. I remember doing nothing. but doing it together, which made it something after all. Now when I put a dish in the microwave for thirty seconds I am paralyzed by the discomfort of unorganized time. Is thirty seconds enough to read something? Check the weather? Pee? I reach for anything to occupy me, but now I've spent all of my time wondering how I should spend it, and the machine beeps, and I have purpose again.”
― Emily Temple, The Lightness