Quotes from Kevin Wilson

We would make every object a weapon that would protect us from anything that tried to convince us that we would not live forever in happiness.

With each deep, measured breath, she imagined that various parts of her body were slowly going numb, from her fingers to her hand to her wrist to her elbow to her shoulder, until she was as close to dead as she could be. It was an old Fang family technique employed before doing something disastrous. You pretended to be dead and when you came out of it, nothing, no matter how dire, seemed important.

Quite a sight," Mary finally said, and I felt like maybe she was sincere, that we were something to behold.

She could not smash anything without breaking herself.

Slowly, the fire rolled down to her hands, and was this jittery flame and she was holding it. She was holding it in her hands, cupped together. It looked like what love must look like, just barely there, so easy to extinguish.

couldn't tell if it was love, but I also knew that I was no real judge of love, having never experienced it or even witnessed it a single time in my life.

And even then, sixteen years old, I knew that I would hate every person in my life who loved me, who took care of me, who helped me find a way to whatever life I would have, because I could never tell them who I was, what I'd done.

When I come back, we'll pretend like this never happened. We'll head to Wyoming and get back to what we do best.' Annie had no idea what it was that they did best; the two of them together seemed below average in all categories.

I don't know what I'm saying, really, but I guess it's like having a kid, though I don't have any kids. It's yours, you made it, and no matter what happens, you have that pride of ownership. You love it, even it it didn't amount to much.

I don't think I can keep looking at this stuff, Buster," she informed him, handing the camera to her brother. "It makes me want to drink either more alcohol or none, and I can't imagine either possibility.

These weird thoughts come into my head, and I don't even really want to think about it, but I can't let go of it until I take it as far as I can, until I reach some kind of ending, and then I can move on. That's what writing is like for me.

The kids were making me feel things, and they were complicated, because these kids were complicated, were so damaged. And I wanted to take them. But I knew that I wouldn't. And I knew that I couldn't give them the hope that I would.

there were a button that would end the world, and that button were right in front of me, I would have smashed it so hard at that moment. I often thought about a button like that, and when I did, I always knew that I'd push it.

It was so nice to hear her voice, to hear her voice and listen to her talk about what she wanted. I never quite knew what I wanted, the letters I sent her so wishy-washy and pained. Madison, she fucking wanted stuff. And when she talked or wrote about it, with that intensity, you wanted to give it to her. You wanted her to have it. And it was so easy, I was in love with her again, the routine of our relationship, that she would hurt me, but I would allow it. I would live with it.

It didn't make her love him more, but it made her understand him just a little, which was maybe all that was left in her family.

I loved this stuff, bad stuff.

You don't know anyone famous who was born in Tennessee?" I asked again, then I tried to think if I knew anyone famous from Tennessee. I knew the professional wrestler Jimmy Valiant was from a town near my own, because some guy at the Save-A-Lot talked about it all the time. But he didn't seem famous enough

I want to be an artist," he told me, like we were both admitting that we weren't human. We didn't understand how normal this was, to be young, to believe that you were destined to make beautiful things.

the sound of something irrevocably giving up its shape and becoming, in an instant, something new.

When I woke up, Carl was standing over me, his hand lightly resting on his cheek, like I was abstract art, like he saw something that interested him but he wasn't sure what it meant, like he thought I was something a child could have made.

If I can't find something on this plate to eat, that's my fault," she replied.

Criticism is like dissecting a dead frog," Caleb said when the book was published. "They're examining all the guts and shit and organs, when the thing that really matters, whatever it was that animated the body, has long since left. It does nothing for the art.

No, she decided, she was taking care of him; someone in this family had to make sound decisions, even if they weren't as fascinating in the end, the lack of any explosions, no screaming or crying or psychological scarring. Then she thought of Daniel, growing an impressive beard in Wyoming, writing the most ridiculous bullshit a human could think of, and began to reconsider her judgment regarding potential love interests.

Art, if you loved it, was worth any amount of unhappiness and pain. If you had to hurt someone to achieve those ends, so be it. If the outcome was beautiful enough, strange enough, memorable enough, it did not matter. It was worth it.