“Um…you’re four blocks away. Why can’t you walk?”“I’m naked.” Sometimes the truth was like a band-aid in needof removal; one had to get it over with as quickly as possible.“And I’m sitting in a bougainvillea bush.”Jason was silent. Even his silence sounded angry. Praline knewhe should have sent a text.”

“He'd already identified me as a heathen, and I hoped he wouldn't try to change that.”

“Nice people always make me want to do bad things.”

“I am resolutely opposed to all innovation, all change, but I am determined to understand what’s happening. Because I don’t choose just to sit and let the juggernaut roll over me. Many people seem to think that if you talk about something recent, you’re in favor of it. The exact opposite is true in my case. Anything I talk about is almost certainly something I’m resolutely against. And it seems to me the best way to oppose it is to understand it. And then you know where to turn off the buttons.”

“Once you have swung a pickax that will reveal the curve of a street four thousand years covered over which was once an active, much-traveled highway, you are never quite the same again.”

“The man exhaled and wondered. He thought about the squid, and he thought about summers divested of chill and abundant with the strange precocity of wild laughter, of warm days spent tracking footfalls in warm sands, of that electric mane of hair, as black as starlight, wheeling and blowing into her eyes and his mouth as the air accelerated over the water. He thought about the dresses, as candid and diaphanous as photographs captured of butterflies in flight, packed up, boxed in, sent away.He thought about domestic sounds smote to dark corners in dim rooms as vast and terrestrial as forsaken landscape, sounds that should not ever be pursued and evicted from this hillside house, sounds that had as much utility and purpose as the wood fashioned to stabilise the house, sounds who proved the most generous tenants he could have ever invited to share the burdensome wealth of his privacy, sounds who left like friends do when they mean not to return, without word or signal or symbol, but with the cruelty of caprice and the loveless whispers of memories receding to a breakwater of ruin.He thought about how sad he had become, and how ugly, and how fast. He thought about all the mornings covertly spoiled by a ramshackle attack of tears, he thought about the immeasurable distance from his house on its hill to the first forge of shoreline by the bay, he thought about the dialogue of terns and the sordid mystery of snow, but he fell asleep thinking about summers ended and the squid, at rest in a shoebox in the bathroom.”

“It’s when you’re safe at home that you wish you were having an adventure. When you’re having an adventure you wish you were safe at home.”