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"Underneath being-startled is the expectation of calm," Zee said, then paused. "I mean, a person gasps because the ease they were expecting was interrupted. I think probably your life hasn't taught you to expect ease.“

"All those severe poets talking big about the wages of sin all the time," Zee added, "but nobody ever brought up the wages of virtue.
The toll of trying really really hard to be good in a game that's totally rigged against goodness."

How when he saw a bird or a tree or a bug, Zee really saw that bird or tree or bug, not the idea of it.

I demand the same leniencies, rationalizations, granted to
mediocre men for centuries.

I am flatterable, and obnoxiously disarmed by praise.

When I say "nations," I mean "armed marketplaces."
Always. That understanding made the world a little bit easier to comprehend, if not tolerate.

"You're a human being, Cyrus," Sang said, gently. "So was your mother. So am I. Not cartoon characters. There's no pressure for us to be ethically pure, noble. Or, God forbid, aspirational. We're people. We get mad, we get cowardly. Ugly. We self-obsess."

and who knows how many people we've all helped ourselves, who everyone we've helped has helped. You know?

"She resented ever needing anything from anyone. The whole thing was an elaborate self-loathing, I think."
"That sounds exhausting," Cyrus said.

Eight of the ten commandments are about what thou shalt not.
But you can live a whole life not doing any of that stuff and still avoid doing any good.

"The pain we feel comes from them, not ourselves," said the banners, and people cheered, certain of all the certainty. But the next day they'd wake up and find that what had hurt in them still hurt.

"Well, of course I changed my mind, I was presented with new information, that's the definition of critical thinking."

He remembered reading about how children who had lost a parent would often act out against the one left, an unconscious way of testing whether that parent could be trusted to remain, unconditionally.

"I cry all the time," she continued, as if I wasn't even there. "I hate it. It embarrasses me. I am not fragile, but sometimes my body just cries and I can't help it. It's a betrayal. Like someone tickling you, you laugh even when you don't want to, even when it hurts. That's how I cry."

a small gift to communicate that he'd been thinking of her before he saw her. This gesture, this possi-bility, had always struck Cyrus as particularly moving an evergreen wonder that anyone remembered him when he wasn't in the room.

how time makes everything bigger,
all of us fighting like it still matters, the blank canvas staying blank

his whole life had been a steady procession of him passionately loving what other people merely liked, and struggling, mostly failing, to translate to anyone else how and why everything mattered so much.

but just being perceived, all the time being perceived, was itself exhausting.

Midwestern politeness felt that way too, Cyrus learned, like it was burning cigarette holes in your soul.

There was nothing in his life that wasn't contaminated by what he mostly mindlessly called "late capitalism." He hated it, like everyone was supposed to. But it was a hate that made nothing happen.

The difference between wanting to not be alive and wanting to die.


Cyrus's holey shoes were flaunting something too: his authentic-ity, his class antipathy, his allegiance to the proletariat

We all started from zero. From less than zero, actually. We started whiny, without grace. Obsessed only with our own needing. And the dead couldn't teach us anything about that. No facts or tables or proofs. You just had to live and suffer and then teach your kids to do the same. From a distance, habit passing for happiness.

Souls that have festered for millennia while science grew. How unfair, this copper delivery. How unfair, this life.
My wounds are so much deeper than yours. The arrogance of victim-hood. Self-pity. Suffocating.

"Angela Davis would say we're all selling our bodies," I said, smiling. "That the only difference between a coal miner and a prostitute is our retrograde puritan values about sex. And misogyny."

"Fuck. I think I'm gonna do it," he said, feeling suddenly thrilled.

"How do we move through all this beauty without destroying
it?" asked Roya.

"Older than the Roman Colosseum!" Some solace in history, per-haps, knowing other civilizations had also destroyed themselves. In fact, the record seemed to suggest such destruction was inevitable, the endpoint of every people.

then tried to remember if she'd eaten anything before leaving home that morning. The morning felt like a week ago, a month, a second.

It was probably the formula keeping Cyrus awake at night.
The formula company probably did that on purpose, put caffeine in the powder so the baby would wake up and you'd have to feed them more and more formula. That was how the world worked. Mercenary. Nothing to be done about it.

"That didn't stop you from getting on your knees with me a year
ago and asking it to remove your suffering."
"Asking what?" Cyrus asked. "What were we even talking to?"
"Who cares?" Gabe answered. "To not-your-own-massive-fucking-ego. That's the only part that matters.

"Can you imagine having that kind of faith?" Cyrus asked. "To be that certain of something you've never seen? I'm not that certain of anything. I'm not that certain of gravity."
"That certainty is what put worms in their brains, Cyrus. The only people who speak in certainties are zealots and tyrants.”