You Shall Know Our Velocity! Quotes
"At this point there were good days, good weeks, when we pretended that it was acceptable that Jack had lived at all."
"My head was a condemned church with a ceiling of bats."
"We just, blindly and without self-doubt, figured we would go all the way around, once, in a week."
"This building warmed itself without regularity or equitable distribution to its corners."
"The air around the desk and on the meadow is about seventy-two degrees."
"I wanted to hug the man but didn’t know local custom."
"We were fools and now we were driving to our deaths in a rental car."
"The streets were narrow and dark. We opened the windows and the warm air touched us with coarse hands."
"I grinned to the wind, because we’d at least come this far and that meant we’d won."
"Friendships, even temporary ones like this, were based on proximity and chance, and so rarely made any sense at all."
"You invite things to happen. You open the door. You inhale. And if you inhale the chaos, you give the chaos, the chaos gives back."
"The point is to offer yourself to death and see if you’re chosen."
"There is travel and there are babies. Everything else is drudgery and death."
"We knew we could spare it. I still had some American hundreds in my shoes, but would that spoil everything? Would it pollute something pure—a simple game between travelers and hosts—by afterward throwing money at them?"
"Almost every life you could lead would conceivably be lived by one of your shadow selves. Maybe even after you die."
"Our help is free of obligation. You must choose us."
"Just make sure you wear condoms. Six condoms."
"The every last minute part. We want you to care."
"It's just such a stupid fucking word to use."
"Our instinct is to create parity, immediately."
"For every good deed there is someone, who is not doing a good deed, who is questioning exactly how you're doing that good deed."
"I don’t know. It’s random. It’s obvious. I don’t know."
"For every secretary giving her uneaten half-sandwich to a haggard unwashed homeless vet, there is someone to claim that act is only, somehow, making things worse."
"I wanted to meet them, would kill to meet them."
"I knew why it had broken. My whole mouth had felt loose and reconstructed since Oconomowoc."
"We decided we’d head into town and find someone’s home and walk into it with flowers."
"We had traveled 4,200 miles or whatever and thus were obligated to create something."
"We stood outside in the cooling black night, and wondered if we could do anything extraordinary."
"It was only then that I began to wonder so many questions: Why was the apartment door ajar?"
"For many months, sleep without alcoholic or masturbatory help had been elusive."
"The point is I don’t want it. And we like giving it. It’s a way to meet people, if nothing else."
"We gave and received love! How can you deprive us of that?"
"You see nothing until you're there. Nothing. Nothing nothing nothing."
"Every act of charity has choice at its core."
"The truth had to be seen. Anything else was a story, entertaining but more embroidered fib than crude, shapeless fact."
"We sleep when we fall. We only sleep when we can’t move anymore."
"Everywhere there are people like you! People who get in the way. You are a constipation!"
"You know nothing of another person, nothing of another place. Nothing nothing nothing."
"We hadn’t gotten tan. Who were these people, all of them young couples, a few fabulous ones, tall thin-haired blondes with toned men in perfectly pressed jeans—neither fearing the loss of the other."
"This is my last day here," she announced. After tonight, she would go to Sweden to become a bartender.
"We could lose it all here, certainly, easily, and would we be more free? In a way, sure, but—"
"You know I walk barefoot sometimes... I can’t have the glass everywhere, hon. I can’t have the broken glass underfoot."
"Stasis is itself criminal for those with the means to move, and the means to weave communion between people."
"Every time something is observed and not fixed, or when one has a chance to give in some way and does not, there is a lie being told."
"I urge you to find that we tried something, knowing nothing of the results."
"To travel is selfish—that money could be used for hungry stomachs and you’re using it for your hungry eyes."
"It felt like we’d been gone for months, as if we’d been in Estonia for weeks."
"How much disbelief, collectively, must be suspended, to allow for tourism?"
"I’ve never reached that level of bliss again."
"B.J. was a New Wave kind of guy far before our town got cable."
"See ya, assmuncher," I said, and we ran off laughing.
"Put that heave into a small velcro pocket in the parachute pants of your soul."
"This is the way of Champagne Snowball: First, a slow song."
"We were given things others have not been given."
"We are not allowed this reaction. Only some are allowed to pollute the world."
"The rules and balances you blather about are hopeful creations of a man fearing death."
"I have thought in my dimmest moments of leaving you as you left me."
"I wanted to have a baby and that baby will die."
"The fucking weight, Hand. How does the woman Ingres live?"
"Thoughts are made of water and water always finds a way."
"There are bears and there are small dogs. Be strong like bear! If they take out your teeth, sit on the dogs."
"If your house is haunted bring in your friends and start tearing the walls down."
"The water was not God. The water undulating slightly with the waves unformed was not spiritual."
"You’re literally carrying them with you at all times. You’re you but you’re also them."
"They forget nothing, you know—they recognize the weight of these mountains."
"It’s just these people carrying around their mountains, knowing the weight of their souls."