Karen Thompson Walker

“...but most houses in California were built without roots, leaving us trapped above ground with the light.”

“how impossibly clean-cut, with its twin sets of twelve, neat as walnut shells.”

“She left her keys in the teeth of the lock where they would dangle all day.”

“But I guess every bygone era takes on a shade of myth.”

“Mais tarde, viria a pensar que esses primeiros dias foram a altura em que aprendemos como espécie que andávamos preocupados com as coisas erradas: o buraco na camada de ozono, o degelo das calotes polares, o vírus do Nilo Ocidental, a Gripe Suína e as abelhas assassinas. As verdadeiras catástrofes eram sempre diferentes - inimagináveis, sem aviso, desconhecidas.”

“I never knew until then that snow made everything quiet, somehow silencing all the world's noise.”

“Ours was a sudden bond, the kind possible only for the young or the imperiled.”

“They say that humans can read each other in a hundred subtle ways, that we can detect messages in the subtlest movements of a body, in the briefest expressions of a face, but somehow, on that day, I had communicated with amazing efficiency the exact opposite of what I most wanted in the world.”

“Of all the strange phenomena that befell us that year, maybe nothing surprised me more than the sound of that small question rolling out of Seth Moreno's mouth: "Want to come?”

“I think we lost something else when we lost that crisp rhythm, some general shared belief that we could count on certain things.”

“Maybe it had begun to happen before the slowing, but it was only afterward that I realized it: My friendships were disintegrating. Things were coming apart. It was a rough crossing, the one from childhood to the next life. And as with any other harsh journey, not everything survived.”

“A single red bucket dangled from a single spoke like the last fruit of summer, or like autumn's final leaf.”

“But I guess it never is what you worry over that comes to pass in the end. The real catastrophes are always different - unimagined, unprepared for, unknown.”