Quotes from Lydia Millet

You know, a survival home for chaos time? Ours is in Washington," said another yacht kid. He had a flouncy bandanna tied around his neck. A really bad idea. Fashion-wise, he seemed to be their equivalent of Low. "State, not district. Obviously," he added. "Ours is in Oregon," said James. "Huge solar array. Looks like fucking Ivanpah. Eleven backup generators.

At times, when a deer saw a man walking in the forest, he might prick up his ears and stand still as a statue. Waiting. Wary. Meaning no harm. What are you? asked his ears. And oh. What am I? Sometimes the answer was, You're dead. And the deer crumpled to his knees.

There were two faces pressed cheek to cheek and looking at the camera: an overly tanned older man, grimacing and shiny, and the trophy wife. They were holding up champagne flutes in hands loaded down with bling. #ilovemyshipwreckedparents. "Hashtag asskiss," said Rafe. "Parents? She's not even his mother!" said Sukey. "Unless she had him when she was three," said Jen. I quit the app.

Course, you couldn't say hard things, not when times were already hard. He knew that much. Only music could cross the divide. The brain's hard wiring, probably, how music resonated—said everything while saying nothing at all. But he preferred to think of it in less scientific terms. Music, the hard currency of the soul.

He thought how the world would feel if it were populated solely by elderly women--a world of forbearance, where all touches were careful.

Personally, I felt no urge to hook up with James. He was handsome enough, or whatever, but he reminded me of margarine. Sneakers that were still stiff from the store. Maybe a roll of thick, bleached paper towels.

Animals were self-contained and people seemed to hold this against them--possibly because most of them had come to believe that animals should be like servants or children. Either they should work for men, suffer under a burden, or they should entertain them.

Janet did not believe it was feasible to be single; to Janet a bachelor eked out his living on the margins of society, orbiting the married couples wild-eyed and feral as a homeless man at a polo party. A single man, to Janet, was superior in the social hierarchy only to a single woman--this last a life form that was repellent but fortunately short-lived, naked and glistening as it gobbled its way out of its larval cocoon.

In the wild, he thought, there would be almost no waiting. Waiting was what happened to you when you lost control, when events were out of your hands or your freedom was taken from you; but in the wild there would always be trying. In the wild there must be trying and trying, he thought, and no waiting at all. Waiting was a position of dependency.

Here was a whole life Beth had missed, a hole where a life should have been. But then, he thought, the universe was made up of holes--was it so terrible to be swept into one? After all. The holes were the black between stars, between constellations. It was holes that were the fabric of the galaxy.

His platform includes a prolife agenda, for instance, which "values the sanctity of every human soul," and also "believes in the greatness of the American family." The word family, on his glossy-but-down-home webpage in its hues of red, white and blue, is a code for you, where you also means right, deserving, genuine and better than those others, you know, the ones who aren't you.

She gazed right through it to the future, another time and place without this jangling cascade of arbitrary noise.

Vigilance fled in old age and man was like the other animals then, who science said could not see themselves. Here man was fully animal again, but he was still tender... you never lost what you were, never lost it fully. There was always the suspicion of a past life that faded and returned.

He had the suspicion that cogs were spinning, the universe beyond his walls was functioning and he was not, but he had no choice.

As consolation you thought of the dead and liked to assume them with you in some sense, present in the ether or the fiber of the mind. But then you had to admit that if they were in fact present, abstractly present as you wished to believe, if they were there in the molecules, their spirit in everything... what fresh horrors would they find?

Helplessness was the one true fountain of youth.

That was what had changed, he thought. To love posterity and the great institutions you had to believe in the wisdom of men. You had to love them as a child might, gazing upward.

What you needed more than anything, for the purposes of ambition, was certainty, was a belief that the rest of being, the entirety of the cosmos, should not be allowed to penetrate and divert you from the cause--the chief and primary cause, which was, clearly, yourself.

The future flew past in a flash of grim. The clock was ticking, and I didn't like that clock.

The parents insisted on denial as a tactic. Not science denial exactly - they were liberals. It was more a denial of reality. A few had sent us to survival camps, where the fortunate learned to tie knots. Troubleshoot engines, even sterilize stagnant water without chemical filters. But most of them had a simple attitude: business as usual.

I have always wished the present to resemble memory: because the present can be flat at times, and bald as a road. But memory is never like that. It makes hills of feeling in collapsed hours, a scene of enclosure made all precious by its frame.

Always I thougt that I would know brother, regardles the years that past, but like the ocean he would not know me

Jen's eleven-year-old brother was a gentle, deaf kid named Shel who wanted to be a veterinarian when he grew up. He suffered a bout of food poisoning just one week in and had to be tended by their parents, so that ID was made. The mother had adult braces and droopy shoulders, the father a greasy ponytail. He picked his nose while talking. He talked and picked, picked and talked.

It made me think of how thin the border was between attractive and not, and yet, if it was there, you didn't want to cross it.