Quotes from Dan Chaon

reckon it was some combination of these things, the feeling that I was separated from the rest of the people of earth by an invisible wall, like a fish in an aquarium.

Miles away, the red taillights of semi-trucks were moving along the interstate, and Dustin was suddenly aware that there were people inside them, that they were traveling to distant places and they would never know that he and Rusty were watching them. It made him feel a strange, tingling kind of ache.

Unfortunately, there can be no doubt that man is, on the whole, less good than he imagines himself or wants to be. Everyone carries a shadow, and the less it is embodied in the individual's conscious life, the blacker and denser it is.

No doubt in the great scheme of things we are all of us the offspring of murderers. Right?

If you could have dozens of lesser lives, didn't that add up to one big one?

For all we know This may only be a dream An old Nina Simone song.

He's like a little bratwurst walking through the dog pound.

There's a rare few that are able to drift through life without being owned by someone.

Constant forgetting is the best cure for all your maladies of anxiety and depression and self-loathing and despair. Rx, Rx, Rx.

As mysterious as the part of himself that was chosen and loved by her, the part of himself that was there only when they were together.

It's called apophenia. It's the tendency we humans have to find meaning in disconnected information. For example, some people believe in what's called the 'twenty-three enigma.' That everything is related to the number twenty-three. It's a surprisingly involved belief.

I pictured the sea as calm and motionless, no land to be seen in any direction. I have made a mistake, I thought. I need another chance. If I could only start over, I thought.

You grew up poor, honey. Poor people don't have good luck.

Tekeli-li! Tekeli-li!

I understand that she was very unhappy, and maybe she was so devastated by her mother's death that she couldn't stand to face it. But who just abandons their family in that way? What kind of person decides that they can throw everything away and reinvent themselves? As if you could just discard the parts of your life that you didn't want anymore.

Poor me. A murderer who got caught before he could murder anybody.

You know what you learn when you study the legal system? Poor people pass down damage the way rich people pass down an inheritance.

Your Mom's Car. Think about that. Try to wrap your brain around the supernatural and spiritual implications that the name bears down you. Your Mom's Car, holding its hand out straight, fingers curled, a zombie reaching for your neck.

Then he began to see through too many things. He cogitated all the hope out of his life, which of course is the danger.

When Beth was killed, she was reading. It was around four on a Thursday afternoon, school was done and she was on her way to pick up Hazel at day care, hurrying down the sidewalk toward the bus stop. Walking and reading, which he always warned her about, her feet moving automatically beneath her as she flipped through a stack of quizzes that her students had taken in preparation for their sixth grade proficiency test. What

Imagine the parts of yourself disassembled; imagine, for example, that nothing is left of you but a severed hand in an ice cooler. Perhaps there is one of your loved ones who could identify even this small piece. Here: the lines on your palm. The texture of your knuckles and wrinkled skin at the joints in the middle of your fingers. Calluses, scars. The shape of your nails.

The memory of it comes to me like a blow to the face, the way all true memories do, unasked for, unwelcome, a full-body possession.

the professor talking about eigengrau—intrinsic gray, brain gray. It was the color you "saw" when light was totally absent, a kind of visual noise, like snow static on a television.

I'm far less worried about whether I'm keeping up with what's trendy, and less embarrassed by the randomness of what I'm drawn to. I've also accepted that I'm never going to get to all the books I want to read in my lifetime, so I've come to peace with the rambling inanity of my whims.