Orient

Was there anything as innocent as willful self-destruction?

Your little eco-friendly fairy tale ain’t going to happen. This was farming land long before it was cute-house land.

When do the defense measures of a paranoid country become their own agents of self-destruction?

No, it’s cool,” Mills replied. “I don’t have a boyfriend. I’m single.” It was the first time he had ever defined himself as single, which felt like defining himself as American in a foreign country. It sounded advanced and self-reliant and lonely.

They were young and gay and the femininity of their teenage years had only recently hardened into the muscle of a competitive sexual economy. Their muscles met the demands of the city, and the city met the demands of their muscles.

Maybe, in the end, a home is a place where you have no other choice but to stay.

But wasn’t there always a someone once for everyone?

It’s all a fucking trap, owning things, places, people. The way I see it, we don’t own things. We get owned.

You don’t realize how old you’ve become until someone young comes around to remind you.

Paul needed to come out, not as gay or straight, but as human.

You know how hard it is to actually touch the world? To make a mark on it? You die and they bury you in it.

Everyone loves a dead artist. It’s the living ones that people can’t tolerate.

Now young people have the Internet and a zillion phone apps so you don’t need an actual place to congregate. You can be everywhere, nowhere, a floating message-spewing entity. We used to rely on drugs to get that sensation.

Art didn’t have to provide answers. It only had to ask questions.

These are the males,” she said. Beth leaned in to examine it. “Any stimulation,” Magdalena said, and finished the thought by gently rubbing her fingers together. The bee’s hoary tail split open, and a thin, stamenlike organ shot out and curled. “Like all males, harmless and easily aroused.” She laughed. “It’s the females you have to be careful about.

The Greeks used to say that gods and animals were born whole. It is only humans who need to develop, that they become complete only with the help of a community. It’s the state of that community that can turn a human into a god or a beast.” She dropped the bee into the terrarium and returned it slowly to the table. “Maybe that’s bullshit. I happen to like the beasts.

All your convictions come back to mock you when you reach a certain age.

I want to sleep with people, steal, get run out of town, leave my fingerprints on every scene. We have a name for it, our generation. It’s our Baghdad.” “Your what?” “My Baghdad,” Tommy said laughing, knowing it was dumb, savoring the dumbness, and maybe also its truth. “The situation you get into knowing it’s fucked-up but you keep doing it anyway, making it an even bigger disaster. Everyone gets one, but that’s how you learn. It builds character, makes you dirty and real. You know you’re a superpower when you can lose every war and still be a superpower. Maybe you’re a superpower because you can afford to lose them. Same here. There should be a Web site that records all the risks a person has taken, all the famous people they’ve met, all their gnarly trips and bad decisions. Like a Web site that ranks who’s lived the most.” “Isn’t that called Facebook?” Mills asked.

That’s what children eventually were for their aging parents: custodians of technology, free personal IT departments keeping them from disappearing forever

Like all paintings, the portrait was ruined at the first stroke of paint; it would never be exactly as she had imagined it, and that failure was what allowed her to continue.

The ocean tries to flood a boat, fire wants to eat the wood, the mind wills to regret, and silence shapes a landscape more deftly than sound - all of that was true.

A family wasn’t forged out of steel. You dig a hole in a person and then you fill it with yourself.

There should be a Web site that records all the risks a person has taken, all the famous people they’ve met, all their gnarly trips and bad decisions. Like a Web site that ranks who’s lived the most.” “Isn’t that called Facebook?

Women had cup sizes to track their development. Men had a ruler and hope.

He tried to imagine the handsome couple by the refrigerator as two sweaty bodies in a bedroom, one on top of the other. Which did what to the other? Mills kept rotating the two men in his mind, which he never had to do when he imagined straight couples having sex.

Condom,” she said. He grabbed a gold square off his nightstand, tore it open, and milked the rubber down his shaft. These were awkward seconds for a man, no matter how attractive the woman under him appeared—legs open, breasts resting on the rib cage—because a man has to stay hard while the woman watches in some negative quiet where irrevocable judgments are formed.

I’m not some outdated alarm company, like Muldoon Security, singular. I’m offering a whole new variety of services, plural—water testing, soil graphs, toxic air readings, the security of this century. The security that you aren’t being poisoned in your own home.

Sometimes it seemed like the whole point of life was not to die the same death as your father.

Do you know what geography really is?” Ted asked. “It’s not the shapes of countries or a list of trade routes. Geography is a snapshot of war, plain and simple. It’s a record of the state of hostile powers at a moment of suspended animation.