Downtown Owl

It is important to have questionable friends you can trust unconditionally.

It was the kind of love you can only feel toward someone you don't actually know.

What is going to happen in the course of my day that will be an improvement over lying on something very soft, underneath something very warm, wearing only underwear, doing absolutely nothing, all by myself?

We all believe that we are a certain kind of person, but we never know until we do something that proves otherwise, or until we die.

Sarcasm is when you tell someone the truth by lying on purpose.

The falling flakes were random and without purpose; the snow was drunker than she was.

Why do we get out of bed? Is there any feeling better then being in bed? What could possibly feel better than this? What is going to happen in the course of my day that will be an improvement over lying on something very soft, underneath something very warm, wearing only underwear, doing absolutely nothing, all by myself?

The soul is a circle

This made her remember why people take up walking: It is because they no longer have anywhere to go.

Maybe I don't need a relationship after all, she thought. Maybe thinking about these conversations was just as good as having them. She could sit in her Honda in the dark and experience whatever kind of life she wanted. Sometimes you think, Hey, maybe there's something else out there. But there really isn't. This is what being alive feels like, you know? The place doesn't matter. You just live.

The things he did on purpose were usually no different from the mistakes he made by accident.

It's peculiar what you remember when you're not trying.

On the third play he dropped back to pass, and it was unadulterated chaos: The pocket was immediately collapsing, people were yelling, everything was happening at the same time, and it felt like he was trying to defuse a pipe bomb while learning to speak Cantonese." "He believed it was his destiny to kill faceless foreigners for complex reasons that were beyond his control, and to deeply question the meaning of those murders, and to kill despite those questions, and to eventually understand the meaning of his own life through the battlefield executions of total strangers." "Teaching history to eighth graders is like being a tour guide for people who hate their vacation." "There is no feeling that can match the emotive intensity of an attraction devoid of explanation.

there’s no such thing as middle-class. The middle class does not exist. If you believe you are part of the middle class, it just means you’re rich and insecure or poor and misinformed.

Leadership is a word people use to reconcile any kind of charisma that was impossible to otherwise explain.

Teaching history to eighth graders is like being a tour guide for people who hate their vacation.

We are remembered for the totality of our accomplishments, but we are defined by the singularity of our greatest failure. It does not matter what you have been right about, and it does not matter how often that rightness is validated by others. We are what we cannot do.

In baseball and sex, cliches are usually true: pitching beats hitting, and people always want to be loved by anyone who doesn't seem to care.

Julia's fake love for Vance was exhilarating and idiotic; it was the kind of love you can only feel toward someone you don't actually know.

People who are wrong during particularly important moments inevitably spend the rest of their lives trying to explain how their wrongness was paradoxically correct, or—at the very least—why their wrongness “felt right at the time,” which is very, very different from being authentically correct.

She said to me, “How is it going, Mitch?” I said, “Okay.” But this is not really true, because she did not specify what “it” was and I did not immediately assume “it” referred to any preexisting situation in my life. I’m sure she didn’t have any idea what “it” was either. She just said, “How is it going, Mitch,” because she wanted to say something aloud in public. Basically, she asked a question she didn’t understand, and I gave an affirmative response to that question, even though I did not know what I was responding to. Neither of us cared about what the other person was talking about or how the other person felt. We expressed two ideas that seemed to be interconnected, but neither of them was true. They were just words. They were neither good nor bad. They could have been any words, really.]

...his lazy eye drifting around the room like a child looking for the bathroom.

...he was forty bushels beyond bamboozled.

The middle class does not exist. If you believe you are part of the middle class it just means you're rich and insecure or poor and misinformed.

No dystopia,' he thought when he looked out his living room window. 'Still just a topia.

Let’s assume it was Christopher Columbus’s “destiny” to discover the New World, and let’s pretend he was consciously aware of that fact. What possible difference would that have made in his day-to-day life? He still had to build the boats.

But here’s the thing: He didn’t get hung. The man climbed on a wooden watercraft and collided with North America by accident. It doesn’t matter what happened afterwards or what his motives were. He found it. It happened. He’s what history is. It was his destiny to be that particular man, and it was his destiny to do those specific things.