Chris

“Nurses and doctors come and go, and family. It's like they're visiting a person at his lonely outpost on the space station, miles above the earth. How do they get there - just coming in through the door like that? In the brief moment between infinite communion with the ceiling and the beginning of whatever conversation they've come to strike up, it seems like the deepest mystery in the world. And then they break the spell, and the world contracts, palpably shifts from one reality into a new and much more unpleasant one, in which there is pain, and suffering, and people who when they are hurt stay hurt for a long time or sometimes forever, if there is such a thing as forever. Forever is a question you start asking when you look at the ceiling. It becomes a word you hear in the same way that people who associate sound with color might hear a flat sky blue. The open shy through which forgotten satellites travel. Forever.”
― John Darnielle, Wolf in White Van

“[Prayer] will not protect you. It will help your soul. It's for while you're alive.”
― Phil Klay, Redeployment

“Every moment happens twice: inside and outside, and they are two different histories.”
― Zadie Smith, White Teeth

“First time was instinct. I hear O’Leary go, “Jesus,” and there’s a skinny brown dog lapping up blood the same way he’d lap up water from a bowl. It wasn’t American blood, but still, there’s that dog, lapping it up. And that’s the last straw, I guess, and then it’s open season on dogs.”
― Phil Klay, Redeployment