“Perhaps all this time I have been wrong about the story's protagonist, the man who runs out of road. Because he hasn't, not really. I mean, he can drive into the ocean. He can always decide to turn around.”
Source: Topics of Conversation
“This was mostly true. I didn't intend to make my story all the way up, but I did want, for no important reason, for my story to be unverifiable.”
Source: Topics of Conversation
“Look, you're all imagining yourselves . . . as people in some kind of story.”
Source: Topics of Conversation
“I do tend to think I'm the smartest person in every room and it doesn't help that lately I have been.”
Source: Topics of Conversation
“I know how this sounds; I mean, now I know how it sounds.”
Source: Topics of Conversation
“Why is it that people tell me things? I think it is because I like, liked, to drink and I am good at keeping my face quiet. Also because I ask questions.”
Source: Topics of Conversation
“These details are hard to remember. Also I may be exaggerating them. Also I may be minimizing them. The difference between the two—for when a memory is retold, its particulars, inevitably, are brightened or muted depending on the arc of the story of which it is a part—a question of, determined by desire.”
Source: Topics of Conversation
“This was the reprieve. A way to keep my mind occupied. To distract it from the topic in which it was most interested and which I—here we imagine the I as a whole and the mind as a part, as apart—most wished to avoid. That part being the self and how it was doing. Whether it was doing it right. The self being my self. The avoidance stemming from a fear of self-knowledge, the kind of self-knowledge—no, you are not doing it right—that provokes not merely guilt but the desire for, the necessity of, reformation.”
Source: Topics of Conversation
“Pondering also how tired I was. Of the discrete—as in distinct, as in finite—pleasure I might take in making one last decision and then no more.”
Source: Topics of Conversation
“For the record, I don't believe in meditation. I don't believe in crystals or cleanses or cosmic dusts.”
Source: Topics of Conversation