They say that if God hates your guts, he grants you your deepest wish.

The past is a black hole, cut into the present day like a wound, and if you come too close, you can get sucked in. You have to keep moving.

Nowhere else was there such an elaborate gradient between the real and the fake. Nowhere else did the boundaries of real and fake seem so porous.

I was enjoying myself, but it was an insulated enjoyment. I was alone inside of it.

He wanted to be unknown, unpossessed by others’ knowledge of him. That was freedom.

The future is more newly arrived college grads and tourists in some fruitless search for authenticity.

New York is possibly the only place in which most people have already lived, in some sense, in the public imagination, before they ever arrive.

But houses, they were our bread and butter. We basked in their homey feeling, imagining the Saturday breakfasts, the TV evenings. And we were familiar with the range of layouts, the types of products, having grown up in similar homes.

Through the yuzu aftershave, I could remember what it was like to kiss him, at the beginning of the summer, when he first took me over to his loft. I went around, looking at his things, his books, the framed art on the walls, his furniture that he’d paid someone to arrange. I opened up his bathroom cabinet and sniffed his collection of aftershaves.