Matthew Barmack

“Eighth Street on St. Mark’s Place has a flush feel with breezy trees and neighborhood stoops with networks of fire escapes above beautifully natural hip people of every stripe striding the streets. It feels like Sesame Street got an expensive new outdoor set upgrade filmed in widescreen Technicolor.”
― Joel Gion, In the Jingle Jangle Jungle: Keeping Time with The Brian Jonestown Massacre

“They wanted the world to always have countries devoid of progress to take them back in time this way.”
― Annie Ernaux, The Years

“So it was that in the middle of middle age, Julian found himself greeting each dawn with pessimism, and each evening reaping the dubious reward of having proved himself correct. Each day he felt less and less valued, more and more irrelevant, a progression that looked inexorable.”
― Chris Pavone, The Doorman: A Novel

“He has this feeling, with women, that it’s hard to have an experience that feels entirely new, that doesn’t feel like something that has already happened, and will probably happen again in some very similar way, so that it never feels like all that much is at stake. There’s often this feeling of—Yes, I like you, but I like other people as well. It’s not even that I like them more. It’s just that I don’t like them less. So to be with any one person feels like an arbitrary thing, and that arbitrary feeling has started to undermine any lingering sense that there might be a particular person that he’s somehow meant to be with.”
― David Szalay, Flesh