Quotes from Antoine Wilson

With great freedom comes great responsibility, someone said once, well, it doesn't work the other way around.

and so I opened my eyes and I opened my mind and I saw something I never would have noticed on a bicycle unless I was going very, very fast down a very long hill. Because of the speed of the bus and how I was exerting no effort, the telephone wires on the side of the road, sagging between poles, went up and down with the same rhythm as my heartbeat.

He'd dethroned the king, married the princess, and taken over the kingdom. Did he really expect me to believe he'd done so ingenuously, blundering forward with a heart full of the best intentions? I think he did. What was more, in that moment at least, he seemed to believe it himself.

There is no more powerful skill for success in any field than knowing how to ask the right questions.

O: Are you asleep, mi amor? C: [no response] O: There is a spider on your face. C: [no response] O: That's a little trick, Juan-George, to make sure someone's really asleep. There's no spider.

the lighthouse, as a symbol, made no sense. Someone had declared it a Christian beacon of some sort, but a lighthouse wasn't something that led you to a safe harbor, a lighthouse was something that you avoided at all costs, a lighthouse was something you stayed away from lest you and your ship be dashed on the rocks. The most perverse message a lighthouse could ever deliver is come here and be saved.

Justice, contrary to public belief, is not blind. Love is blind, but Justice? Look at any statue, at any depiction. She is blindfolded.

Was this what it meant to have the eye? To be able to discern a distinction in quality so subtle as to be invisible to the man on the street?

Money sloshed around via wire, and artworks of dubious provenance moved from collector to collector trailed by 1031 like-kind exchange tax forms, deferring taxes even as the work appreciated, or so Jeff understood, when Fiona explained it.

She certainly carried that arrogance with her at dinner, and again when she dropped off the transparencies. He was surprised to hear that she'd crumbled so publicly, but then again, those kinds of people were often more fragile than they seemed. Harder, but more brittle.

love my wife," Francis said. "I love her deeply. I wouldn't be the man I am without her." He shifted in his chair. "That said, were she to leave me, as she has the right to, not to mention the reason, I could bear the absence of her affections.

And she is older, in my defense, the way Alison goes on you'd think I'd been fucking an undergraduate. In any case, once Astrid and I had established relations, I understood that they might cross paths, so we were exceptionally discreet about our . . . connection.

And then there's the matter of the show. Did he promise her a show? Is this how the gallery works? Is this how he and my mom got together in the first place? How many women has he done this to? His eye, his eye, everybody's always talking about his eye. But is it an eye for art or for ass?

Something the doctors hadn't been able to figure out earlier, because, he found out later, Francis hadn't divulged to them his habitual cocaine use.

Naturally, nobody mentioned his infidelities, his treachery, his tendency toward domination and humiliation, his utterly mercenary approach to most art, his yelling, his firing people on a whim, his inability to or lack of desire to recognize the inner lives of others, his avarice, his all-around tendency to make

Jeff was called "dawg," "bro," "dude," and "Holmes," and

What about the way he tried to raise his arm while looking at Jeff? Did he remember that? What had he been trying to do? Signal? Beckon? Acknowledge? Thank? Even if everything that had happened at the beach was a blur, or a blank, Jeff had no doubt that somewhere in that man lingered a remnant of that canceled gesture.

I say 'told myself' because—and this became clearer to me later, I didn't know this back then, I wasn't wise to it—to put it bluntly, we never really know why we do what we do. The part of our brains tasked with generating reasons doesn't care about truth… only plausibility.

Plus he'd put on weight, become more solid in the way so many of us did after college, continuing to grow into manhood long after we thought we'd arrived.

Every sighting of this mystery man yielded a frisson, as if he were my guardian angel keeping tabs on me, followed by a pang of anxiety at the thought that I might never see him again.

had already spent hours in the airport, my tickets having been purchased last minute and at the cheapest possible fare—a red-eye from LA, a layover at JFK, a flight to Frankfurt, a four-hour train ride to Berlin—and the idea of a first-class lounge was so appealing I could have hugged old Jeff right there and then.

Whether this was fashion or indigence was never clear to me.

Stop thinking. From the moment one enters the airport, one is subject to a host of procedures and mechanisms designed to get one from point A to point B. Stop thinking and be the cargo.

don't think I wanted so much to be married as I was trying to wipe out the anxiety I was feeling about our inevitable drifting apart.