Quotes from Craig Davidson

This went on for five minutes. At no time did he disappear. "Can you still see me?" "Afraid so." "Damn!" His eyes snapped open. "Nothing? Didn't my skin turn opaque?

Wealth hung awkwardly on some people, gave rise to perversions of taste and common sense: fad diets and Tae Bo and shit-in-milk-jug art exhibits. Some people were better off poor.

The skin of Herbert's chest and arms and head turned opaque as a nearly colorless essence, smoke or mist or fog, rose off his body.

Before long your fears become adult ones: crushing debts and responsibilities, sick parents and sick kids, the possibility of dying unremembered or unloved. Fears of not being the person you were so certain you'd grow up to be.

They say a man can change his personality—the basic essence of who or what he is—by five percent. Five percent: the total change any one of us is capable of.

I'd lie with the moonlight angling through the backyard maple to cast a fretwork of shadows on the wall and remember the ghost of my old fears, although I no longer saw the shadows as the skeletal hands of a beast come to claim my soul

Betamax is the wave of the future

If Miss Havisham had gone with that sassy taffeta number instead, hey, who knows, maybe it would've been all peaches and cream.

The day before, everything had been normal—boring, even. It's hard to comprehend how fantastic normality can be until . .

As far as I was concerned, there was nothing wrong with being an odd duck. I figured some people have edges that don't allow them to slot neatly into the holes society expects them to fit into, that was all.

Funny how meaningful those small tender gestures can be: a friend picking burrs off your shirt, the ones you can't get because they're stuck in that unreachable spot on your back.

We're Irish, Jake, which means heredity carries us halfway to madness smack out of the womb.

When you're a kid all you know is that your dad puts on his suit or overalls and vanishes from your life until nightfall. Sometimes my pops came back exhausted and scarlet-eyed, as if he'd been engaged in a low wattage war someplace.

Some creatures live as stars do: burn hard and hot, feeding on those nearby but primarily upon themselves. Their lives an inferno and them happiest in that heat. Eating away at themselves until all that remains is appetite.

The brain is wider than the sky, For, put them side by side, The one the other will include With ease, and you beside. The brain is deeper than the sea, For, hold them, blue to blue, The one the other will absorb, As sponges, buckets do. The brain is just the weight of God, For, lift them, pound for pound, And they will differ, if they do, As syllable from sound. —Emily Dickinson

If I trample something critical, the patient may awaken lacking a vital memory. That one where they gazed into the sky as a child wondering how a star might taste, settling on breathtaking wintergreen. The smell of their newborn daughter's scalp, or that haunting tingle on their lips following their first kiss.

My mom says Dove lives like a sun does. In this never-ending state of heat and light that would burn the rest of us up.

But the mind is a truth-seeking organ. To use that old cliché about our hearts, it wants what it wants.

It had struck me that most people's lives unfolded through a constant process of recalibration. Things happen, often unexpectedly, and a person's life adjusts to account for them.

People the world had broken in some ineffable way, the same way my uncle had been broken, the same way we all end up a bit broken—a collection of small hurts, hairline cracks in the foundation—who were only looking for something to give their lives meaning, hope, or at least help deal with the confusion. Some of us find it in faith, some in science, and some in the lightless places between those pole stars.

Honestly, my dear, I find myself struggling to care.

You always fall hardest the first time, don't you? There's no bottom to it. As I reached teenagehood and beyond, I'd hear guys say: I just don't get women. And sure, I didn't get women either, but wasn't that the best part, the not knowing? Where else could that wild, passionate, scream-it-from-the-rooftops love come from?