The Candy House: A Novel

a symbiosis that made her old life obsolete, had been temporary.

“I still enjoy being alive, if that’s what you’re asking,” she said. And then, in a phrase that haunted Chris, “But I’m tired of my history.”

And yet these many irreconcilable worlds occupy one physical space—like the D&D maps stacked inside a single envelope. How is it possible? Philosophy!

If she’d had an inkling, back then, of the ache this constraint would cause her, she would never—not once!—have said, “Let go of me, boys, I just need a minute,” and shaken them off. She would have held still and let them pick her clean, understanding that there would be nothing better to save herself for.

The fact that so many thoughts could have gone through my head in 3.36 seconds is testament to the infinitude of an individual consciousness. There is no end to it, no way to measure it. Consciousness is like the cosmos multiplied by the number of people alive in the world (assuming that consciousness dies when we do, and it may not) because each o

I see now that the place I’ve been yearning for is my own imagination.

One horror of motherhood lies in the moments when she can see both the exquisiteness of her child and his utter inconsequence to others.

How can the architecture contain all those lives? Why doesn’t it explode from the pressure?

Here was his father’s parting gift: a galaxy of human lives hurtling toward his curiosity. From a distance they faded into uniformity, but they were moving, each propelled by a singular force that was inexhaustible. The collective. He was feeling the collective without any machinery at all. And its stories, infinite and particular, would be his to