Station Eleven

The sensation of being in a dream that will end at any moment, only she isn’t sure if she’s fighting to wake up or to stay asleep.

which is to say that almost everyone has the right clothes, the right haircut, the right everything, while Miranda flails after them in the wrong outfit with her hair sticking up.

There are pools and eddies of conversation around the table.

as usually happens when she tries to say something funny, her audience seems not to catch the joke.

The paperweight was a smooth lump of glass with storm clouds in it, about the size of a plum. It was of no practical use whatsoever, nothing but dead weight in the bag but she found it beautiful.

“The thing with the new world,” the tuba had said once, “is it’s just horrifically short on elegance.”

“Do you think he’d describe himself as unhappy in his work?” “No,” Dahlia said, “because I think people like him think work is supposed to be drudgery punctuated by very occasional moments of happiness, but when I say happiness, I mostly mean distraction. You know what I mean?”

The Wendy’s was a low square building with the look of having been slapped together from a kit in an architecturally careless era, but it had a beautiful front door. It was a replacement, solid wood, and someone had taken the trouble to carve a row of flowers alongside the carved handle.

Survival might be insufficient, she’d told Dieter in late-night arguments, but on the other hand, so was Shakespeare.