“Forget being a decent man, Terence. Go for castability. Could you even play a decent man in a movie?”

“Pulling through is what people do around here. There is a kind of bravery in their lives that isn’t bravery at all. It is automatic, unflinching, a mix of man and machine, consuming and unquestionable obligation meeting illness move for move in a giant even-steven game of chess – an unending round of something that looks like shadowboxing, though between love and death, which is the shadow? “Everyone admires us for our courage,” says one man. “They have no idea what they’re talking about.”“Courage requires options,” the man adds.“There are options,” says a woman with a thick suede headband. “You could give up. You could fall apart.”“No you can’t. Nobody does. I’ve never seen it,” says the man. “Well, not really fall apart.”

“After four movies, three concerts, and two-and-a-half museums, you sleep with him. It seems the right number of cultural events.”

“And though he continued never to express a single word of love for me, not in any way of his several languages, I could not take a hint. Let the hint be written across the heavens in skywriting done by several planes - I was dense. Even skywriting, well, it wasn't always certain: it might not cover the whole entire sky, or some breeze might smudge it, so who could really say for sure what it said? Even skywriting wouldn't have worked! Several years later, I would wonder why I had thought my feelings for this man were anything but a raw, thrilling, vigilant infatuation. But I still had called them love. I was in love. I had learned the Portuguese and the Arabic for love, but all for naught.”

“The catalog showed a man sleeping peacefully while his model-wife read a book in soft but focused light. In real life, however, the light was so intense that the same man would have had to wear sunglasses.”

“it seemed one could just say are you serious? for the rest of existence and it would never be unjustified and would always have to be answered and so would keep the conversation going”

“Adoption. A realized fantasy of your parents not really being your parents. Your genes could thrust one arm in the air and pump up and down. Yes! You were not actually related to Them!”