Quotes from Michael Paterniti

Everything is heaped in the frigid no-smell of winter, cars skidding, then running off roadsides into gullies.

Didn't anybody respect tradition, making food by hand, the slow way? Hadn't anyone frittered away a Sunday afternoon at the bodega gorging themselves on the bounty of the land—the sparkling wine, the beautifully constructed chorizo?

I often found myself curled up at midday on a hard wooden bench, snoring lightly, drooling on the back of my hand, trying to sleep off my exuberance—and then waking to a headache and a bushel of horrible paragraphs. Admittedly

Even now, when I imagine Einstein's dendrites and neurons firing as his brain lit upon relativity, I picture Baghdad, with its minarets and modern-antennaed buildings sparkling beneath thousands of phantasmagorical tracers, under Allied attack on a very dark night.

Divinity, not machines. Standing among the sunflowers, I craved divinity.

as the American mind moves from the imprisoning whimsy of cities through some harder-boiled practicality to the eagle flight of the West.

All of these people, it was as if they were all turning to gold, all marked with an invisible X on their foreheads, as of course we are, too, the place and time yet to be determined. Yes, we are burning down; time is disintegrating.

If he was dismissed and despised by the local folk in life, the economics of his immorality have called for his complete resurrection.

I'll keep these same photographs pinned to a wall above my desk as tiny parables.

sun sinking, sky filling with pink and orange light, great expanses of land just sitting, seemingly waiting for the return of big creatures to make it small again.

Good night, Senator,' I say, and he looks at me as if he's in the presence of someone unraveling, which he may be.

When put to it, I can be an alright conversationalist. But I find openings are always tricky.

I try again, with the friendliest-looking man I can find. He's middle-aged and round-bellied, like his group of friends, all wearing University of Wisconsin sweatshirts emblazoned with the schools mascot, Bucky Badger.

She stands up in a short black and gold dress, looking like someone's risque aunt in age denial at a wedding.

Sometimes even the believers forget what they believe.

There's an amazing release that comes when you drive coast to coast, when you plug one ocean into another in your mind. And the wake of your travel fills with a kind of awe and love for everyone and everything and every animal and every roadside diner you've seen between the two.

He begins by quoting Thoreau: 'The mass of men lead quiet lives of desperation.

She's a woman who enjoys the liberal use of first names.

One gets the impression that when this house is full there's probably nothing here but love and a hell of a racket.

And while his brain kept whirring with the problems of a unified theory, his body became frail and thin, wrinkles fell over him like elephant skin, and began to slouch, as if with each new day he was carrying a slightly heavier pack on his back.

And my parents, whose end I can't imagine. And then, of course, me, the one trying to find a reason for living in the first place.

She gives off an aura of enormous sadness, though her powers of humor and forgiveness seem to run equally as deep.

It all seems so anticlimactic, but so appropriate.

I can hear beer cans softly pattering down on the pavement, then nothing.