Quotes from Dan Chaon

The circumstances of life-the events of life-the people around me in life-do not make me the way I am. They reveal the way I am.

I guess I always thought it would be bigger, when a terrible thing happened. Didn't you think so? Doesn't it seem like houses ought to be caving in, and lightning and thunder, and people tearing their hair in the street? I never - I never thought it would be this small, did you?

You really romanticize the white-trash period of your life,' Rain once said to me, which I thought was a little hurtful but perhaps true.

This is one of those things that you can never explain to anyone; that's what I want to explain - one of those free-association moments with connections that dissolve when you start to try to put them into words.

That night I sat up writing in my diary writing to Big Me: 'I hope you are alive ' I wrote. 'I hope that I don't die before you are able to read this.

The type of person who will always be your friend, for as long as you can stand to keep disappointing her.

Fraj-ile, I say, pronouncing it the way she does - as if it might be a popular tourist destination in the Pacific, beautiful Fraj Isle, with its white sandy beaches and shark-filled coves.

There are a great number of what appear to be teenage runaways, but in Portland it seems that even the elderly dress as if they are teenage runaways, in hoodies and kerchiefs and ragged jeans, stinking of patchouli and dirty feet, and one tattooed old man even rolls by on a skateboard.

I guess, says Deagle, finally, I'll just have a pack of Marlboro Lights. That's what I used to smoke when I was human.

He had grown fond of the old proprietress, Mrs. Matalov, who had been a magician's assistant back in the 1930s, and who now, even at ninety-three, had the stoic dignity of a beautiful woman who was about to be cut in half.

You could say that they were sweet, or you could say that they were something out of a horror movie.

Maybe love, like suffering, is relative.

People can find patterns in all kinds of random events. It's called apophenia. It's the tendency we humans have to find meaning in disconnected information.

You want a child because it is a link in the bridge that you are building between the past and the future, a cantilever that holds you, so that you are not alone.

It's always terrible when you realize that you've married the wrong book.

Outside, the sleet had gotten thicker. You could hear it pebbling against the large glass windows, you could see it swirling wildly through the spotlights of street lamps. It was the kind of night when you might expect to see a skeleton flying through the air, its ragged black shroud flapping in the wind.

It was disconcerting to live in a time in which accepting reality required a suspension of disbelief.

The two of you stood there, side by side, and the tectonic plates of your lives began to shift and resettle, continents separating.

Does a human life, a personality, exist as a single thread that can be followed through time? Is the me of 20 years ago the same me that exists now? Will I still be me in 20 years?

Her name...was Mrs. marina Orlova, and she had grown up in Siberia. Later, she would tell him that she loathed the American custom of constantly smiling: They are like chimpanzees, she said, in her bitter exclamatory voice. She grimaced, baring her teeth grotesquely. Eee! she said. I smile at you! Eee! It is repulsive.

The first time she had tried to kill herself, she had intuited that there was no escape. She had seen, with sudden clarity, that her life was a series of boxes, a maze that she would run and run through and never find an exit, and she thought, almost peacefully, I don't want it. I don't want my life.

She looked at me as if I might be one of them a spy from the world of the ignorant.

Hesitantly, I touched the stump where my finger used to be. In my mind, something almost remembered itself, but the fumes of turpentine were making me a little lightheaded; whatever memory was on the verge of coughing itself up was gone even before it materialized. Out the window, I could see a squirrel was stumbling erratically around in circles underneath the old basketball net. Then I realized that it wasn't a squirrel; it was a brown paper bag.

I should be arguing vehemently with doctors, demanding results, I should be surrounded by people who are bleeding and screaming and shocking one another with defibrillators.