Nightfold

“You tell yourself this is no less or more real than bowling at Chipper's.[...] That this moment is the same as every other moment, that it makes no difference to the atoms, to the air, to the creature whose walls breathe all around you.”
― Jeff VanderMeer

“Was that the definition
of the future? Not even striving to know
itself like the present might”
― Mark Z. Danielewski, There's A Place For You

“Alaska finished her cigarette and flicked it into the river.
'Why do you smoke so damn fast?' I asked.
She looked at me and smiled widely, and such a wide smile on her narrow face might have looked goofy were it not for the unimpeachably elegant green in her eyes. She smiled with all the delight of a kid on Christmas morning and said, 'Y'all smoke to enjoy it. I smoke to die.”
― John Green, Looking for Alaska

“[Carlos is] a temporary euphemism hung upon a large amalgamation of disparate biological material, memory and feeling. The name attached as a country is assigned to a stretch of land and water - nobody is expected to believe that it is real”
― Martin MacInnes, Infinite Ground