Carly

“My question for Will is: Does this feel like a country at peace or at war? I’m joking, sort of, but he answers seriously. He says it feels the way it does just before it starts. It’s a weird thing, but you learn to pick up on it. Even while everybody’s convincing themselves it’s going to be okay, it’s there in the air somehow. The whole thing is more physical than mental, he tells me. Like hackles? The way a dog’s hackles go up? Yes, he says.”
― Jenny Offill, Weather

“You spend so much time playing in your mind, like a sandbox. Everything just slipping through your fingers, nothing solid to hold.”
― Ottessa Moshfegh, Death in Her Hands

“Later, I remember to tell Ben about the girl. “Seconds!” I say, but he is unmoved. “People always talk about email and phones and how they alienate us from one another, but these sorts of fears about technology have always been with us,” he claims.

When electricity was first introduced to homes, there were letters to the newspapers about how it would undermine family togetherness. Now there would be no need to gather around a shared hearth, people fretted. In 1903, a famous psychologist worried that young people would lose their connection to dusk and its contemplative moments.

Hahaha!

(Except when was the last time I stood still because it was dusk?)”
― Jenny Offill, Weather

“A little lying never hurt anybody. It kept the bounds of what one person was distinct from what another person was.”
― Ottessa Moshfegh, Death in Her Hands