What author’s (dead or alive) persona is aspirational?
I have never found any authors to be aspirational.

The bullies, they made him feel young, alive. He would never admit this to anyone, but he was fairly sure the other teachers, after a glass of wine or three, would concur.

I am always wearing one of Freddy’s shirts. They are worn in perfectly and covered with jazz players on the front or artists that older people always recognize—artists I don’t really know anything about.

Asking if a computer can do art or science is like asking if a submarine can swim...

Every breakfast, lunch and dinner were meticulously documented, each square captioned with the day’s creation: superfood pumpkin risotto, fatty bananas (bananas and butter), avocado tomato mash, yummy liver and beets, creamy spinach and pear, soupy rice porridge, breast milk oatmeal, silky tofu, creamy vegetable soup

“...symbols of the divine show up in our world initially at the trash stratum. Or so I told myself.” – VALIS

“There’s a rose that grows on no man’s land, and it’s wonderful to see” – The Rose of No

i keep love around like a shirt i hope i’ll fit into again someday

you don’t want to 

come out

looking gauche

“If you want, we can try to unlock the phone using your dad’s thumb.”

"Do it," I heard myself say.

you can convince someone of 
anything at all

Infidelity is fed to us as sexier when it’s female

All Rachel ever wanted to be was a reality TV star. Rachel didn’t mind which show she ended up on, as long as she became famous and had at least 3 brand deals behind her.

You are so smooth-skinned / I would send your husband / to war to die.

Alice scoops the teeth up and puts them back in her mouth, slipping them into the holes they were ripped from. She is not sure where else they would go.

Is John Doe a writer, or just a content machine?

I ignored it when he admitted he had cheated on all of his girlfriends, and I ignored it when he became quickly angry over something small. I ignored the red flags

I am always talking about the quality of paying attention and the quality of being willing to go into the unknown, being willing to not know. 

I have let love demolish me.

I thought he’d text back “lolz.” Twin tower memes were funny now.

Destroy something for my sake.

Okay, you know how I like to go to the bathroom. We’ve talked about it at sessions over and over again.

writing questions, like

why does he come over in the bad storms

and make excuses not to leave

Mostly we ordered in pizza and put on slow music that looped and stayed on your rug until our pleasures panged together.

“I’m just excited that my first time voting in a presidential election was for a woman,” my daughter said

“yeah,” I said

“that’s so exciting,” I said

On the back of his badge, he had a barcode with which he could change almost anything.

My book is really about loneliness and alienation (like all my favorite books), but politics comes up in it because everyone is obsessed with politics now.