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“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. That’s the whole crisis… The belief that goodness is built on a constructed absence, not doing.”

“He wanted, acutely in that moment, to be not-alive. Not to be dead, not to kill himself, but to have the burden of living lifted from his shoulders.”

“He felt a flash of familiar shame—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.”

“She was Christian but American Christian, the kind that believed Jesus had just needed a bigger gun.”

“‘How do we move through all this beauty without destroying it?’”

“…experimenting with weed and benzodiazepines… He started having sex, smoking cigarettes. It was like being born—there was so many feelings he’d never felt. He’d wasted years with meditation and chamomile. There were all these seasons nobody even mentioned…He wanted to live them all.”

“If every relationship was a series of advances and retreats, Cyrus was almost never the retreat-er, sharing everything important about himself at a word, a smile, with a shrug, as if to say, ‘Those are just facts. Why should I be ashamed?’”.

“‘Well isn’t it true? You don’t have a home until you leave it and then, when you have left it, you never can go back.’”

“I would like to be a writer who can keep a cool distance from the subject…That is not what I am like. I want to consume and be consumed by the objects of my desire until they make me sick; I want to puke them back out and rearrange them like tea leaves... Tell me whats interesting about you, and I will put it in my mouth, chew it up, and spit out out later on, never guaranteed to be better than I found it”

“What was strange was that this was but one tiny aspect of the dreadful human triangle occurring everywhere, without end, forever”

“‘Paris is old, is many centuries. You feel, in Paris, all the time gone by. That isn’t what you feel in New York’ … ‘Perhaps you feel’ I told him, ‘all the time to come. There’s such power there, everything is in such movement. You can’t help wondering…what it will all be like—many years from now’”

“and the world is mostly divided between madmen who remember and madmen who forget”