“I just get a feeling sometimes that everything is predetermined, and I am going through the motions of tracing an existence that will be what it will already be.”

“I was only twelve, but through the slow, inevitable burn of a thousand sunrises and sunsets, a thousand maps traced and retraced, I had already absorbed the valuable precept that everything crumbled into itself eventually, and to cultivate a crankiness about this was just a waste of time.”

“Do you ever get the feeling like you already know the entire contents of the universe somewhere inside of your head, as if you were born with a complete map of this world already grafted onto the folds of your cerebellum and you are just spending your entire life figuring out how to access this map?”

“Whenever I smelled the same perfume on other women, no matter where I was, I was instantly transported back to that feeling of discovery. The sensation of fingertips against old paper, whose surface was powdery and fragile, like the membrane of a moth’s wing.”

“What happened to all the historical detritus in the world? Some of it made it into drawers of museums, okay, but what about all those old postcards, the photoplates, the maps on napkins, the private journals with little latches on them? Did they burn in house fires? Were they sold at yard sales for 75¢? Or did they all just crumble into themselves like everything else in this world, the secret little stories contained within their pages disappearing, disappearing, and now gone forever.”

“I would not know what to say to you, except this: there was never a map that got it all right, and truth and beauty were never married to one another for long.”

“I suddenly had an idea of how adults can hold on to a feeling for very long periods of time, long after the event is finished, long after cards have been sent and apologies made and everyone else had moved on. Adults were pack rats of old, useless emotions”