Stay True Quotes
"At that age, time moves slow. You’re eager for something to happen, passing time in parking lots, hands deep in your pockets, trying to figure out where to go next."
"We weren’t in search of answers. These weren’t debates to be won: certainty was boring. We were in search of patterns that would bring the world into focus."
"To love friendship, one must love the future."
"The intimacy of friendship, he wrote, lies in the sensation of recognizing oneself in the eyes of another."
"Modern life, theorists like Derrida explain, is full of atomized individuals, casting about for a center and questioning the engine of their lives."
"Youth is a pursuit of this kind of small immortality. You want to leave something behind."
"What I want to say is that we have to have ideal thinking, heart, feeling about the society, environment, etc. But we also need to accept that there must have a way to change the world, or surrounding, to be better."
"Maybe, in fact, there was no truth. The word itself was meaningless. How did we come to agree on the meanings of words to begin with?"
"We craved new contexts, initiating routines that might eventually feel second nature."
"The present was a drag. We lived for the future."
"Neither Anthony nor I drank, but everyone was free to bring vodka, beer, whatever."
"Soon, people would lose their relationship to something called free time."
"The expansiveness of a free night, writing so that I might appear in my own lines."
"In real life, I feared stepping into too large a world and failing."
"I have a photo that Anthony took that fall semester in the bungalow."
"Maybe I, too, will become the kind of person who has books like Infinite Jest casually strewn on his cool, angular coffee table."
"Friendship is about the willingness to know, rather than be known."
"It felt remarkable to stand so close to a hero and to be called by him into history."
"Ken wanted to see himself in the world. It was as though he were just now discovering that such a thing might not happen."
"Constructing your personality is a game, one that requires you to joust with the expectations of others."
"We seek recognition, even if what you want to hear from a close friend is that you’re a one-of-a-kind weirdo that they’ll never truly understand."
"Friendship rests on the presumption of reciprocity, of drifting in and out of one another’s lives."
"It felt as if the authorities weren’t moving fast enough. Maybe Henry would crack the case first."
"Harmony was forbidden; it no longer made sense to me."
"I became obsessed with the possibility of a sentence that could wend its way backward."
"A way to loot and hoard in a city on fire, to impose structure on chaos."
"I didn’t volunteer to deliver the eulogy, but the fact that I was constantly writing that week, engaged in a kind of showy archivalism, made me seem like the natural choice."
"It displaced some of my grief to feel the stress of an impending deadline."
"Every dinner was a party. We would share memories, verging downward, and then someone would recall something funny, pulling us back from the precipice."
"I wrote him things that were crass and profane, silly and accusatory, broken and desperate."
"It was an out-of-body experience. I didn’t recognize the words on the page; I was somewhere else."
"I spent years trying to describe that laugh; it was husky and nasal."
"The program identifies me as a member of Sigma Alpha Mu, something Ken would have found hilarious."
"I felt faint, the week’s exhaustion finally catching up to me."
"I left to meet Alec and Gwen at a new vegetarian fast-food restaurant on Telegraph."
"I understood part of teaching is being a vampire. You draw on your students’ energies, and you learn just as much as you teach."
"It suddenly made sense to always assume the worst."
"Partying in Mexico was the kind of thing I never would have done before Ken’s death, but I hoped it would connect me with an openness to fun that honored his memory."
"I was looking to see if anyone had kept his name alive."
"What happened simply happened, and to poeticize all that never transpired leads us somewhere else—not history, but faith."
"But sifting through these small moments of the past was a way of resisting the future."
"When you’re young, you do so many things hoping to be noticed."
"In that instant, before every memory was placed along some narrative arc, I simply felt lucky to witness something so effortlessly kind."
"You are able to recall with clarity the last time you saw people, what they were wearing, because you are positive that something terrible is about to happen."
"We are always unaware that we already live on the precipice of tragedy."
"You dwell on questions of potential and promise, what could have been."
"The immigrant’s resourcefulness requires an exhaustion of possibilities."
"I was enamored with things that were impossible to resolve."
"It was so efficient. We’d been here for only twenty minutes, and I was done."
"Maybe it was time to let go of that part of the story."
"It’s not as if I had never considered it, but hearing someone else say these things aloud felt invigorating."
"I missed that feeling of having once known exactly what to say."
"It would be an account of love and duty, not just anger and hatred."
"The true account would necessarily be joyful, rather than morose."