Quotes from Kevin Wilson

I knew that until I truly believed that whatever I did was the exact right thing, I'd keep doing the wrong thing.

I was not flexible, lived a life that required me to be tense at all times in case someone tried to fuck me over, and I found the simple act of making my spine erect, making my pelvis and thighs do regular stuff, was a little more difficult than I'd expected.

Again,' he said and, without waiting for an answer, ran into the growing dark without fear, every single part of his body overwhelmed with the task of being alive.

People would call him Professor Fang, which sounded so much like a super villain that he wasn't sure he could go through with it.

I was pacing through the house, brushing my hair, rubbing moisturizer on my face, clipping my toenails, all these little things to make myself presentable, and, each time, I'd look at myself again in the mirror and feel like not a single thing had changed.

From that point on, I guess I sort of realized that my imagination, which made life tolerable, needed to be kept a secret from the rest of the world.

Timothy was already there, his hands clasped together on the table like he was ready to pray or like he was your boss and was really sorry but he was going to have to fire you.

I don't know if that's love, to need the sensations produced by the body more than the body itself. Not the kiss, but the taste of celery that came after. Not his hands, but the sound of his hands making art. Not the fact that he was here only for this summer, but the fact that I might find reminders of him in surprising places for the rest of my life.

And we made it. The kids were happy. They had added another to their numbers. They didn't want to set the world on fire. They just wanted to be less alone in it.

I'd never been the most responsible employee. It was the hard thing about having two jobs: you had to disappoint them at different times and sometimes you lost track of who you'd fucked over worse.

Children are not guaranteed the luxuries of family, Ms. Wells," he said. "If people are unable to exist within the parameters that have been created for them, they lose any claim to titles like son and daughter.

feeling the world flatten out. I started to care less about the future. I cared more about making the present tolerable. And time passed.

even though I actually did not like to be touched, I just let it happen. I allowed it. It was fine.

And I know, in that moment, that my life is real, because there's a line from this moment all the way back to that summer, when I was sixteen, when the whole world opened up and I walked through it.

This was how you did it, how you raised children. You built them a house that was impervious to danger and then you gave them every single thing that they could ever want, no matter how impossible. You read to them at night. Why couldn't people figure this out?

Buster was not used to this experience, physical desire that was actually fulfilled. In his entire life, he had kissed five women. One of them had been his sister. This was, Buster understood, a terrible percentage. He could count on one hand the number of times he'd had sex and still have enough fingers left over to make complicated shadow puppets.

Buster closed his eyes, held his breath, and, before he realized that the gun had been fired, a gust of heat and wind passed over him and deconstructed the beer can atop his head, the sound of something irrevocably giving up its shape and becoming, in an instant, something new.

Safe travels," she said, and she allowed just the slightest musicality into her normally monotone voice. I loved how expertly bitchy she was; I wanted to study her for a year.

He felt certain that he was a failure, every artistic endeavor ending with his own surprise at how little had come from it. Perhaps that was how life worked, the expectation of success after each failure the engine that kept the world turning. Perhaps retrogression was an artistic endeavor in itself. Perhaps he might sink so far that he would find himself, somehow, returned to the surface.

Great art is difficult," Caleb said. After a few moments, he said, "But I don't understand why it has to be so difficult sometimes.

It is strangely wonderful to feel the lack of something instead of believing that it was never there in the first place.

He would teach himself to dislike what he actually liked, to approve of what he did not totally understand, in the hopes that he would come out the other side with something that resembled inspiration, something that would make him more famous than Chris Burden or even Hobart Waxman.

They stood, a family, and walked out of the mall, into the sunlight, seeking to rearrange the shape of their surroundings, to blow something up and watch all the tiny pieces resettle around them like falling snow.

Buster sat on the curb in front of the college, waiting for his sister to pick him up. To pass the time, he skimmed the stories of the creative writing students. One was about a wild party and the story consisted almost entirely of a detailed explanation of a drinking game called Flip 'N Chug that seemed, to Buster, to be too complicated to facilitate the simple goal of getting drunk.