Home > Work > Driving Mr. Albert: A Trip Across America with Einstein's Brain
1 " At first, you fall in love. You wake in the morning woozy and your twilight is lit with astral violet light. You spelunk down into each other until you come to possess some inner vision of each other that becomes one thing. Us. Together. And time passes. Like the forming of Earth itself, volcanoes rise and spew lava. Oceans appear. Rock plates shift. Sea turtles swim half the ocean to lay eggs on the mother island; songbirds migrate over continents for berries from a tree. You evolve--cosmically and geologically. You lose each other and find each other again. Every day. Until love gathers the turtles and the birds of your world and encompasses them, too. "
― Michael Paterniti , Driving Mr. Albert: A Trip Across America with Einstein's Brain
2 " Only occasionally can you glimpse through the embrasures of an otherwise perfectly polite person to see the cannons aimed out, only in a certain glint of light do the eyeteeth become fangs. We are driven by desire and fear. Only in our solitary hungers do we find ourselves capable of the most magnificently unexpected sins. "
3 " In our national parlance, what's usually meant by the word "maverick" is someone who skirts the edge of sanity--or is so insane as to appear sane--who then does something absolutely insane and yet, after the passage of time, and especially if the maverick's creation yields a profit of any kind, is deemed less and less insane until the maverick worms his or her way into the fibers of history. Then generations grow to envy the ingenuity and courage of the maverick while glossing over the maverick's genetic kookiness. On such shoulders, a country rises. "
4 " Take your hallowed halls of Congress or the littered floor of the Stock Exchange, America is built on its pancake houses! "
5 " Chicago rising out of the Midwest like huge metallic cornstalks... "
6 " After all, I couldn't name my longing, and yet it was there, always driving me away from the place I stood. "
7 " No one in my family questions my desire, however inchoate or ineffable, because it's partly their desire too: this need to be self-sufficient and free at all costs. "
8 " Talk of you or me,' he told her, 'but never of 'us. "
9 " Marriage is the unsuccessful attempt to make something lasting out of an incident... "
10 " For these moments in transit, when you ride in the bubble of your own thoughts, without intrusion, moving at sixty, seventy, eighty miles an hour, everything becomes color and speed and, for a moment, you outrace your own woes. "
11 " Once beyond Philadelphia, the state opens into hills and mountains and broad, flat valleys. "
12 " Despite the fact that he was a sixty-one year old man when he was naturalized as an American citizen, it's amazing how fully he's been appropriated by this country. "
13 " We talk for maybe ten minutes, perfunctory talk in a way that we're never really perfunctory, all skirting the question of us, and I begin to wonder if she had caller ID whether she'd picked up at all. "
14 " I listen to the line as it disconnects, to the last wave of electricity as it pulses from Maine to the Hoosier State, from her to me, and then wait for the thick silence that flows behind it. "
15 " Sara and I still find a way to talk for hours on the phone, or within the span of ten minutes somehow make it feel like it's been hours. Early in our relationship, when we lived apart for a time, we'd talk every night on the phone. "
16 " Those phone calls, those millions of words and stories, merely became the beginning of the Book of Us. "
17 " You evolve--cosmically and geologically. You lose each other and find each other again. Every day. "
18 " Eighty miles an hour, velocity becomes the measure of our progress, the speed of forgetting. "
19 " ...Indiana and Illinois, the two states conjoined like Siamese twins. "
20 " It's not that the Midwest lacks bustle; it's just that away from the cities, the deadlines are imposed by the earth and its seasons. "
