Brenden Sousa

“Ming Kai gasped for air, a breath he didn’t seem to exhale, and his eyes fluttered shut. “He’s dead,” his replacement wife said, not without a little sadness. “He’s dead.” A moment passed, that silent moment when the soul leaves the body. Or, rather, when it’s supposed to. “No,” Ming Kai said, eyes still closed. “Not dead. Sleeping so I can dream.” “Damn you,” said his replacement wife. “Damn damn damn you.”
― Daniel Wallace, The Kings and Queens of Roam: A Novel

“Whether you take a doughnut hole as blank space or as an entity unto itself is a purely metaphysical question and does not affect the taste of the doughnut one bit.”
― Haruki Murakami, A Wild Sheep Chase

“It was laid out much like any other town—thoughtlessly, and in haste. Here is where the rich people lived, and here the workers. This is where the white people shopped, and here was the special store for the Chinese, which had everything they could ever want, as long as they didn’t want that much.”
― Daniel Wallace, The Kings and Queens of Roam: A Novel

“I don’t want to suggest that I was listening to or even overhearing the conversation the two of you were having. I am not the sort of man to eavesdrop. I would say, however, your words did seem almost to float on the air from your table across to my own, which in any case is a short distance, and, having arrived, they were, I would say, impossible not to hear, just as one would have no choice whether to hear a car backfire, or a bird sing. Very difficult not to hear, if one can hear, if one has ears; it’s involuntary, you see. We hear things whether we want to or not, and in this way the words you were speaking to one another entered my ears”
― Daniel Wallace, The Kings and Queens of Roam: A Novel