Quotes from Michael Paterniti

He suddenly appeared on the world's doorstep, inspiring pan-national awe and reconciliation--a liberal German Jew who clung to his Swiss citizenship and renounced violence.

We talk for maybe ten minutes, perfunctory talk in a way that we're never really perfunctory, all skirting the question of us, and I begin to wonder if she had caller ID whether she'd picked up at all.

I listen to the line as it disconnects, to the last wave of electricity as it pulses from Maine to the Hoosier State, from her to me, and then wait for the thick silence that flows behind it.

Sara and I still find a way to talk for hours on the phone, or within the span of ten minutes somehow make it feel like it's been hours. Early in our relationship, when we lived apart for a time, we'd talk every night on the phone.

Those phone calls, those millions of words and stories, merely became the beginning of the Book of Us.

You evolve--cosmically and geologically. You lose each other and find each other again. Every day.

Eighty miles an hour, velocity becomes the measure of our progress, the speed of forgetting.

Indiana and Illinois, the two states conjoined like Siamese twins.

It's not that the Midwest lacks bustle; it's just that away from the cities, the deadlines are imposed by the earth and its seasons.

though we belong to this country as much as this country belongs to us, we only move through its rooms as momentary visitors, projecting our ideas on its walls, that the best we can do is live a good life, perhaps add a couple replicas of ourselves...

In essence, they predict that science, not religion, will guarantee us an afterlife.

Or Einstein regenerated, living a life on top of the life he's already led, doomed by the accomplishments of his former self.

Or would you just sit around smoking pot all day, rebelling against yourself?

you can do nothing to stop the ocean or the sky from what it will do.

or works along its rim with busy fingers like a string of prayer beads.

For between them, ex-husband and wife, some unspoken body of love has been laid to rest, and they stand awkwardly next to it now, regarding it in its coffin.

we're beholden not to look away from the things we fear or revere.

It's the drunkenness of all the new things that can be.

A chaos of wrinkles map his face, an entire life set there: Mexico City.

DID YOU BECOME ADDICTED BECAUSE YOU FELT PAIN?' 'I wish I could say that, Doctor, but no,' says Burroughs. 'I became addicted because I wanted more.

A celebrity once-removed, driving his groupies agog, but then not flaunting it, and not asking for it, either.

But then where is she? It's a simple question but once it's been asked, a floodgate of questions follow: What if something's happened?

Days pass and years pass and you light the holy candle of yourself by the glimmer of someone else, and just when you think you're burned out on her, you realize that she's the single thing that raises you above yourself. And now she's dumped you flat and taken up with a lumberjack or that sensitive guy in town who runs the bookstore or the FedEx man who wears tight shorts in the summer. That guy? How could she?

It's so deceptively easy to get people to stop trusting their own senses. They cut you off and then put fear in you.