The Tsar of Love and Techno

You remain the hero of your own story even when you become the villain of someone else's.

Turning I would to I did is the grammar of growing up.

The calcium in collarbones I have kissed. The iron in the blood flushing those cheeks. We imprint our intimacies upon atoms born from an explosion so great it still marks the emptiness of space. A shimmer of photons bears the memory across the long dark amnesia. We will be carried too, mysterious particles that we are.

You remember how Mom had that embroidered pillow? When she got upset, she’d shout into it and no one would hear her. That’s Facebook.

The future is the lie with which we justify the brutality of the present.

There are so many paths to contentment if you're open to self-delusion.

I guess our lives are all dreams – as real to us as they are meaningless to everyone else.

A single whisper can be quite a disturbance when the rest of the audience is silent.

Everything large enough to love eventually disappoints you, then betrays you, and finally, forgets you. But the things small enough to fit into a shoebox, these stay as they were.

Hipsterdom's a tightrope strung across the canyon of douche-baggery. He clung by a finger.

The portrait artist must acknowledge human complexity with each brushstroke. The eyes, nose and mouth that compose a sitter's face, just like the suffering and joy that compose his soul, are similar to those of ten million others yet still singular to him. This acknowledgment is where art begins. It may also be where mercy begins. If criminals drew the faces of their victims before perpetrating their crimes and judges drew the faces of the guilty before sentencing them, then there would be no faces for executioners to draw.

The obvious is only obvious when it happens to someone else.

If there is an operation, and if that operation is successful, she says she will move to Sweden. I fear for her future in a country whose citizenry is forced to assemble its own furniture.

Endurance, I reminded myself, is the true measure of existence.

The problem with rejection is that it feels imposed even when it's earned.

The stomach is not the only vital organ that hungers.

I have human friends, obviously. But everything's easier with a cat. He wants a little fish soup in a saucer and the occasional scratch on the head. I want the illusion that an animal bred to trade affection for food can understand the inquietudes of my soul.

You have waited for me past the orbits of Mars and Jupiter, past each of Saturn's rings. It's ridiculous, so stupid, I know, to cross the entire solar system just to hear you and Galina butcher Tchaikovsky. If ever there was an utterance of perfection, it is this. If God has a voice, it is ours.

Kolya kissed her wide eyebrows, her neck, every square centimeter of her nose. The parts she mentally amputated were the ones he most adored. Beneath the sheets they were pale and naked and they pouched their hands in the warmth between their stomachs. They pressed together with a need that is never satisfied because we can't trade atoms how hard we thrust. Our hearts may skip but our substance remains fixed. We're not gaseous no matter how we sit to cloud together inseparably. Nothing less would have satisfied Kolya, nothing less than obliterating himself in her was sufficient.

This should be a librarian’s job, of course, but you can’t trust people who read that much.

To say he felt guilty would ascribe to him ethical borders that were lines on a map of a country that no longer existed. At least, that's what he told himself. Better to deny the existence of objective morality than to live in its shadow. Better to tell yourself that the world of right and wrong is not the world you belong to. In the bathroom mirror he saw the face of a man his seventeen-year-old self would have disdained with the vanity of someone yet unaware of the many means the world has to break him.

The television dramas we grew up on, stories of star-crossed lovers, stories of love overcoming all obstacles, well, they’re all fairy tales, obviously, like the television news; but the obvious is only obvious when it happens to someone else.

In order to become the chisel that breaks the marble inside us, the artist must first become the hammer." [Soviet censor of paintings and photos]

[T]o some people ignorance is a sleeping mask they mistake for corrective lenses.

I never imagined that something as solemn and final as death could be this idiotic. It was the keyhole through which I first glimpsed life's madness: the institutions we believe in will pervert us, our loved ones will fail us, and death is a falling piano.

No one likes a braggart, and to praise your children is to curse them with misfortune, but we admit it, if only in secret, if only to ourselves: We are proud, we are so proud of them. We've given them all we can, but our greatest gift has been to imprint upon them our own ordinariness. They may begrudge us, may think us unambitious and narrow-minded, but someday they will realize that what makes them unremarkable is what kept them alive.

Behind the ticket counter stood a man as skinny as a soaked poodle. He sported a shirt of swatch-sized plaid and a blond ponytail that, unless destined for a chemotherapy patient, should have been immediately chopped off, buried in an unmarked grave, and never spoken of again. Hipsterdom's a tightrope strung across the canyon of douche-baggery. He clung by a finger.

We were so awkward, morning pimples in the mirror, hair where we never wanted it, and we thought of the lung cancer X-ray that was the album art for Surfin' Safari, considered the ways a body betrays its soul, and wondered if growing up was its own kind of pathology. We fell in and out of love with fevered frequency. We constantly became people we would later regret having been.

Never forget the first three letters of confidence.

We should all be so lucky to get from life a sunny-day swim in chemical waste.