Ando Johnson > Recent Status Updates

“It turns out the main reason you were friends is proximity, and having shared some strange intense experience together. In the rough seas of the real world, you can’t get the magic back of being on a rooftop in Pittsburgh with someone you’ve finally accepted you love.”

“You gotta enjoy the process’s, kid. The hours suck, the pay is mediocre, but you’re making movies, you know what I mean?”

“We drifted off into shared quiet.”

“One of the big problems with being a human is that you spend the whole time you’re here inside one one body, looking at the world through one set of eyes, unable to really imagine with any clarity what it would be like to be someone else.”

“I do not want to want to be loved by strangers. But I do not want to want most of what I want.”

“Perhaps our whole lives were just a series of letting go - of certain values and beliefs, of people and memories. We let go of certain things, quietly or with a thud, in the hope of reaching greater, better ones, while the rest wilts away.”

I wanted to savour an instant on my own, to be held in a state where I had no obligations, no worries and neither a past nor a future.“

“All of these things, which had once been my entire world, the village and my father, toys and my books, becoming fainter and smaller until I could barely see them, like stars whose light could no longer reach me. And I thought that the only way to make sense of this fall, the only way to assign value to it, was for wherever I ended up to be astonishing in its brightness.”

“I want to be with someone whose absence I feel.”

“There’s nothing lonelier than that feeling, of trying to love someone, without managing to.”

“That urge I had in London, to work out who I was without any anchors, without anyone who reminded me of home. I wanted to be in a place empty of anyone able to show me my reflection, so that I could forge it myself.”

“Do we live to be remembered? Or do we live to live?”

“We all float through space on a rock, hurtling toward forever. So many of us forget that it’s other people who make life worth living. As much as we like to think so, we can’t do this alone. Everyone needs someone. Maybe not all the time, but enough that it matters.”

“If he was indeed mad, his delusions were beautifully organized.”

“Unlike the animals, who knew only the present. Man had acquired a past; and he was beginning to grope towards a future.”

“He felt the first twinges of a new and potent emotion. It was a vague and diffuse sense of envy - of dissatisfaction with his life. He had no idea of its cause, still less of its cure; but discontent had come into his soul, and he had taken one small step towards humanity.”

“The stars are too vibrant to not chase after.”

“Nobody hides like tears. We could learn a thing or two from them.”

“He didn’t say everything would be okay because it wasn’t — it would never be as it had been. The past had a perfection that the future could never hold.”

“They’d made a pact to be friends forever, but forever could be so, so brief.”

“There is an emotion that operates on a register above sherry terror. It lives on a mindless dog-whistle frequency. Its existence is in itself a horrifying discovery: like scanning a shortwave radio in the dead of the night and tuning it to an alien wavelength—a heavy whisper barely climbing above the static, voices muttering in a brutal language that human tongues could never Speak.”

“The more detail you get into, the more fun it gets.”

“No plan survives first contact with the enemy.”

“I took a breath from Rover planning. Instead, I spent the day taking drugs and playing with radiation.”

“The worst moments in life are heralded by small observations.”

“Stay strong, don’t die, your father says hello.”

“Godspeed, little taters. My life depends on you.”

“Hell yeah I’m a botanist! Fear my botany powers!”

Life doesn’t go on, it starts again, everything is possible once more. Anything can happen, all the best and all the most beautiful and all the biggest adventures in the world.”

“They’ll soon be grown men, and all they will talk about then as each year passes will be more about memories and less about dreams. This is the end of the age when everything is still possible.”

“If the person I used to fear is now my protector, which of us has changed sides?”