“…and from afar it looks like everyone is happy, but it’s only when you get up close that you see the granular trappings of their malaise, and maybe that’s why weddings are packed with people, a gaze that rewards the eye with a kind of ease, the stacks of smiles, the beautiful clothes…”

“When a woman is cruel it is too destructive. If women were cruel, it would destroy too much.”

“I bet it’s in our blood to fight like that. And make up like that too. Our fights will look the same and there’s nothing we can do.”

“We had time to spin shells around each another. Every minute in silence we lived 100 million years. More than 500 times the span of humanity.”

“To her left, the olive grove, which leads down to the driveway and out to the road. How would she find anything in the overgrowth?”

“A billow of steam formed and reformed continuously, so that you could almost see a figure emerging from it, some massive hand or face, the thrust of a ribcage or crest of a hip.”

“She got the sense, not for the first time on that tour, that she was waiting for something, and it irritated her. There was nothing to wait for. Everything that was happening to her was already happening.”

“It’s like if you were deep in the forest, and there were trees with peeling bark, and the grass was kinda wet, and it was night, so there was a bit of a coolness.“

“Hollis dreams without vernacular, without soundtrack, without history, without himself. The event is only landscape, a gray shingled acreage that is not quite a desert, not quite a sea.”

“She was one of many ghosts here, and the new moon excited them all.”

“A life, even half of one, is so much to consider. I’ve always been bad with time, it unfolds before me in a kaleidoscopic blur.”

“The stadium erupts in applause. I clap my hands together and smile. I’m with my friends, and I’m with a sea of strangers.”

“I am thousands of miles long. I am shrinking. As I recede from the sky, the crescent returns to the moon. I am pressing into human proportion.”

“You exist in shared time with some people—call it love. There is no going forward, no going back.”

“She was enamored, entranced. In the mirror, she was powerful, graceful, not feminine, but femininity itself. Was she real?”

“My shadow made a human-shaped hole in the images. A negative space. My head hurt. I wanted to capture everything we were to each other, see if those distant years meant anything.”