He sees Mark’s bag of fried flowers on the tip-pocked table. Funny thing about those flowers. Who’d voluntarily cook and eat a rose? It’s like planting and watering a breadstick. It’s perverse, and even sort of obscene, eating what’s clearly put on earth to be extra-gastric. Didn’t taste all that hot, either. And there’s still a piece stuck with th

Say the whole point of love is to try to get your fingers through the holes in the lover’s mask. To get some kind of hold on the mask, and who cares how you do it.”

“My opinion: Faye is the sort of girl who’s constantly surfing on her emotions. You know? Not really in control of where they take her, but not quite ever wiping out, yet, either. A psychic surfer. But scary-looking, for so young. These black, bulging, buggy eyes. Perfectly round and black. Impressive breasts, though.”

Also because D.L. was also weird, and conspicuously so, even in an environment—a graduate writing program—where neurosis was oxygen, colorful tics arranged and worn like jewelry.

We’re all quite tired, and deprived, and it’s getting pretty clear that we’ll probably be asleep by the time the actual revel gets started; so I’m going to cease all fucking around and just tell you what Magda tells Mark—what she knows, from just her senses, which are never in demand.

Like many Americans of his generation in this awkwardest of post-Imperial decades, an age suspended between exhaustion and replenishment, between input too ordinary to process and input too intense to bear, Sternberg is deeply ambivalent about being embodied; an informing fear that, were he really just an organism, he’d be nothing more than an ism

Drew-Lynn will, in time, become J.D. Steelritter Advertising, and discover that the key to all ingenious and effective and original advertising is not the compelled creation of all-new jingles and images, but the simple arrangement of old words and older pictures into relationships the consumer already believes are true.

I woke once, very late, to his broad brown back, moving, a rhythm, his open hand to his face, still repeating.

“Almost Talmudically self-conscious?” Mark says. “Obsessed with its own interpretation?”