Tangled Mind

“The seas will rise and our cities will be swallowed by the oceans... The air will grow so hot we won’t be able to breathe. The world will be remade for Him, and His kind. That white man was afraid of indifference; well, now he’s going to find out what it’s like." [p. 146]

“They make it look so easy, like they were an actual married couple.” She frowned.“At Mona’s, the regulars seem to think they have to pick--who’s the boy, who’s the girl. Babs and Franny aren’t like that. They’re just two women sharing a life together.”
“I know. If I’m in pants, I must be butch. If I wear my hair down, or have lipstick on, I’m a femme.”
“One customer told me that I had to choose, or I wasn’t really --" [p. 133]

“My dear,” he said. “I give you my word that you’ll have an offer of marriage before I leave. Even if I have to do the job myself.”
She jumped to her feet, pushing away from him. “That’s not funny,” she said, not even bothering to moderate her tone. “It’s not a joke, no matter what you might think, and I’ll thank you to stop treating it as one.” [p. 36]

I am left here alone with myself and the others and with the sizzle of my brains in this woman’s skull, a resonant frequency that perfectly matches white noise, the random signal possessed of a perpetual power supply, and in discrete time, a procession of serially uncorrelated random variables (finite variance, zero mean). [p. 26]

Words, in their minds, were not fixed to things as a tendon is to a muscle. Every particle of creation, to them, was submerged in a flux of words. Everything was contiguous with everything else, the touching of one word or object setting up currents and mutations that seemed never to stop. They described the world by ceaselessly unsettling it... [p. 26]

The young were always theoretical; only the middle-aged could realise the deadliness of principles. To subdue one’s self to one’s own ends might be dangerous, but to subdue one’s self to other people’s ends was dust and ashes. Yet there were those, still more unhappy, who envied even the ashy saltiness of those dead sea apples. [loc. 6327]

(Just when you think you’re having a scene without Simon, he drops in to remind you that everyone else is a supporting character in his catastrophe.) [p. 196]

One of the perilous things about being an adult is there comes a point where the doors of your mind open far wider than required by your own concerns. There’s no ceremony when this occurs, and no warning. It simply happens one day and suddenly you find there are seventy things going on at once and you’re flinching amidst a maelstrom of love and lost opportunities and hard choices and the tenacious grasping hands of the past, not to mention tidying the garage. Adults are not distracted for the sake of it, so cut them a little slack. [p. 276]

A couple of nights in a haunted house. A bit of a laugh, really. Only now he can’t sleep and the vague, queasy feeling that he’d had when he’d first arrived in the house hasn’t let up. He has the sense of being … infected with something. [loc. 1777]

He has lost his daughters, but he has also lost the memory of losing them. But he has not lost the loss. [loc. 2867]