Quotes from Kevin Wilson

She is prettier than her picture had prepared me for, blond curls, big blue eyes, like a fake child that someone would make in order to convince people to have children.

I heard Carl shout, and I turned to see Roland now on fire, though not as bright as his sister. Carl simply kicked him into the pool, where he fell like a rock, extinguished.

That does not surprise me,' Annie said and once again hung up the phone thinking that she had chosen to surround herself with people who were, for lack of a better term, retarded.

There were no measures that truly protected against disaster; you simply held on to what mattered and hoped that you found your way to the other side.

I guess I just mean that sometimes your mom says that things will be better for you in the future. And I think they will, Frankie. I think you're really smart and I think you'll do fine. But I also think it's not so bad if you never quite feel right in this world. It's still worth hanging around. You just have to look harder to find the things you love." "Okay," I said. I kind of wanted to hug him.

Annie, no stranger to disappointment, felt the hope break down inside her body and disperse without any lingering effects.

You are very sweet," she told him after a year of dating, as they shared dessert at a restaurant, "but it's like your family trained you to react to the world in a way that was so specific to their art that you don't know how to interact with people in the real world. You act like every conversation is just a buildup to something awful.

I saw an ancient man appear on the porch, wearing a huge red bow tie, a blue oxford shirt, khakis, and red suspenders. He had on little round glasses. He looked like Orville Redenbacher, the popcorn guy. He looked insane in that way of people who put great effort into choosing ridiculous clothing. I prayed this was not the doctor. "I'm the doctor!" he said, waving to the children.

My mom had once told me that being a mother was made up of "regret and then forgetting about that regret sometimes.

It was hard to see where he was going, and he was careful not to damage the camera, so expensive that his father made him name it (Carl), so he would treat it more carefully.

we just rode in silence the rest of the way, the radio playing easy listening that made me want to slip into a hot bath and dream about killing everyone I knew.

Wyoming, to Annie, was represented by a blank, bleak space in her imagination. It was a place she could hide. The worst that could happen would be that she would sleep with Daniel and then get eaten by a wolf. She could live with that.

But do you enjoy it?" Annie asked. Raven stared at Annie's reflection in the mirror. "I don't hate it," Raven said. "You spend enough time with anything, that's all you can really ask for.

Up to this point, all I knew were beaten paths, tattooed with footprints, and I had come to the understanding that they were not much fun to travel because so many people were waiting for you at the end, wondering what took you so long.

It had all been fake, a choreographed event, but they could not escape the dread that rattled inside their chests. It was a testament to their proficiency and talent as artists. They had affected themselves with the authenticity of the moment.

It amazed Izzy the way the children rushed through so many complicated emotions without space between each one. Everything rose so quickly to the surface and then subsided, like firecrackers, and what had originally been so jarring to her, their unguarded emotion, now filled her with great comfort, that anything, no matter what it was, would eventually give way to something else.

Real obsession, if you did it right, was the same intensity every single time, a kind of electrocution that kept your heart beating in time. It was so good.

S]he found it impossible to move, the weight of her failure keeping her anchored to the sofa.

Let's just keep going, super cool," I said. "Nothing to see here.

Annie took another sip of the vodka, letting the alcohol seep through her system, turning bad ideas into good ones.

I wondered if this was a sign that, whatever happened this summer, I'd be the one with a scar.

I reminded myself to be smarter. I was smart. I just had a thick layer of stupid that had settled on top of me. But I was still wild when I needed to be. I'd get smarter.

Here's the thing, sweetie. If you love something, you can't think too much about what went into making it or the circumstances around it. You just have to, I don't know, love the thing as it is. And then it's just for you, right?

We'd created meaning where there was none, but, I don't know, isn't that art? Or at least I think it's the kind of art that I like, where the obsession of one person envelops other people, transforms them.