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“The ghost of a creature long extinct was coming in on silent footprints, returning to the place it had once held in the complex anatomy of this forest like a beating heart returned to its body.”

I have held the certainty of the damned, that sense of “everything is going to be just this, this misery forever, till I die.” An irrepressible inescapable horror stretching out infinitely in every direction. Tragic, that only terror feels that way. That even in Roya’s and my impossibly good moments, I instinctively knew to hold them, to store them inside myself like pockets of fat for the lean seasons ahead.

“The trees dropped their flowers, then their branches, to the ground—slowly, almost delicately, like new lovers undressing in front of each other for the first time.”

“He understood, with a clarity that had until that moment in his life eluded him, that he was not at all made for the world in which he lived, that art and writing had gotten him only trivially closer to compensating for that fundamental defectiveness, the way standing on a roof gets one only trivially closer to grabbing the moon than standing in the dirt.”

“This idea that beauty is the horizon toward which all great art must march. I’ve never been interested in that.”

“For our species, the idea of art as ornament is a relatively new one. Our ape brains got too big, too big for our heads, too big for our mothers to birth them. So we started keeping all our extra knowing in language, in art, in stories and books and songs. Art was a way of storing our brains in each other’s.”

“We spend our lives trying to figure out how to pay back the debt of being. And to whom we might pay it.”

“That’s the whole crisis. The rot at the root of everything. The belief that goodness is built on a constructed absence, not-doing.”

“Everything green just farms is, Cyrus thought. Feeding us oxygen and eating our corpses.”

“But be was also awash in the world and it’s checkboxes- neither Iranian nor American, neither Muslim nor not-Muslim, neither drunk nor in meaningful recovery, neither gay nor straight. Each camp thought he was too much the other thing. That there were camps at all made his head swim.”

“It felt like the only time Cyrus ever really felt now-ness was when he was using. When now was physiologically, chemically discernible from before. Otherwise he felt completely awash in time: stuck between birth and death, an interval where he’d never quite gotten his footing.”

“”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.”

“It feels so American to discount dreams because they’re not built of objects, of things you can hold and catalogue and then put in a safe. Dreams give us voices, visions, ideas, mortal terrors, and departed beloveds. Nothing counts more to an individual, or less to an empire.”

“She’s missing some primal instinct, self-defence or self-preservation, which makes other human beings comprehensible. You lean in expecting resistance, and everything just falls away in front of you.”

“There’s always been something in her that men have wanted to dominate, and their desire for domination can look so much like attraction, even love. In school the boys had tried to brake her with cruelty and disregard, and in college men had tried to do it with sex and popularity, all with the same aim of subjugating some force in her personality.”

“He finds himself crossing things out in his journal as if he imagines some future person poring over it in detail, as if he wants the future person to know which ideas he has though better of.”

“Generally I find men are a lot more concerned with limiting the freedoms of women than exercising personal freedom for themselves.”