Home > Author > Dan Chaon
81 " Let us say that this, all of this, has a logic to it. We understand each other, don't we? Are we not, you and I, both of us spirits?Reader, do not ask me who at this very moment is dreaming you.Do not ask me when you are going to die.Do not ask me where the gold is buried. "
― Dan Chaon , Stay Awake
82 " How good it felt to be alone, stacking blocks. That's what came to him again, a kind of weight solidifying in his chest: how much he had loved to be alone - to be outside of his own life, a giant, sentient cloud looming over his imaginary city, hovering above it. There was a certain kind of blank omniscience that felt like his true self, at last. "
83 " And he saw now that it wasn't real. That it had never been real. He could feel that other life shrinking and losing its possibility, and he knew that it was something that he should never, ever, think of again. "
― Dan Chaon , Ill Will
84 " No doubt in the great scheme of things we are all of us the offspring of murderers. Right? "
― Dan Chaon , Sleepwalk
85 " If you could have dozens of lesser lives, didn't that add up to one big one? "
― Dan Chaon , Await Your Reply
86 " For all we know This may only be a dream An old Nina Simone song. "
87 " He’s like a little bratwurst walking through the dog pound. "
88 " As mysterious as the part of himself that was chosen and loved by her, the part of himself that was there only when they were together. "
89 " It’s called apophenia. It’s the tendency we humans have to find meaning in disconnected information. For example, some people believe in what’s called the ‘twenty-three enigma.’ That everything is related to the number twenty-three. It’s a surprisingly involved belief. "
90 " I pictured the sea as calm and motionless, no land to be seen in any direction. I have made a mistake, I thought. I need another chance. If I could only start over, I thought. "
― Dan Chaon , The Beckoning Fair One
91 " You grew up poor, honey. Poor people don't have good luck. "
92 " Tekeli-li! Tekeli-li! "
93 " We see things not as they are, but as we are. Because it is the ‘I’ behind the ‘eye’ that does the seeing. "
94 " I understand that she was very unhappy, and maybe she was so devastated by her mother's death that she couldn't stand to face it. But who just abandons their family in that way? What kind of person decides that they can throw everything away and reinvent themselves? As if you could just discard the parts of your life that you didn't want anymore. "
95 " and the thing that shocked her the most was how quickly such absences began to close. even after a few weeks, you could see how soon her parents would be forgotten, how their presence became an absence, and then...what? What did you call an absence that ceased to become an absence? what do you call a hole that has been filled in? "
96 " Poor me. A murderer who got caught before he could murder anybody. "
97 " Then he began to see through too many things. He cogitated all the hope out of his life, which of course is the danger. "
98 " When Beth was killed, she was reading. It was around four on a Thursday afternoon, school was done and she was on her way to pick up Hazel at day care, hurrying down the sidewalk toward the bus stop. Walking and reading, which he always warned her about, her feet moving automatically beneath her as she flipped through a stack of quizzes that her students had taken in preparation for their sixth grade proficiency test. What "
99 " Imagine the parts of yourself disassembled; imagine, for example, that nothing is left of you but a severed hand in an ice cooler. Perhaps there is one of your loved ones who could identify even this small piece. Here: the lines on your palm. The texture of your knuckles and wrinkled skin at the joints in the middle of your fingers. Calluses, scars. The shape of your nails. "
100 " the professor talking about eigengrau—intrinsic gray, brain gray. It was the color you “saw” when light was totally absent, a kind of visual noise, like snow static on a television. "