Andrew Cheek

“Of course, it mattered; perhaps the knowledge would not help to build bridges or make new medicines, but that was not all that science was about. Science was about the truth, about knowing what was possible and what was not; it was about the fervor I had felt looking upon the beached whale, or the fossil tooth in Catherine's palm. I had spent my whole life since in service to that same longing: the ravenous beast that was curiosity.”
― C.E. McGill, Our Hideous Progeny

“There is something romantic about feeding a predator from the palm of your hand, I think- a creature which might bite you if it chooses, but chooses not to. But how does one turn such awful beauty to lead and ink on a page?”
― C.E. McGill, Our Hideous Progeny

“...hideous psychic fallout they'd all endured both in active marijuana-dependency and then in marijuana-detox: the social isolation, anxious lassitude, and the hyperself-consciousness that then reinforced the withdrawal and anxiety - the increasing emotional abstraction, poverty of affect, and then total emotional catalepsy - the obsessive analyzing, finally the paralytic stasis that results from obsessive analysis of all possible implications of both getting up from the couch and not getting up from the couch...”
― David Foster Wallace, Infinite Jest

“Perhaps I am meant to drown after all. But if I do, then at least it will have been by my own hand.”
― C.E. McGill, Our Hideous Progeny