Stay Awake
Dan Chaon
Top 10 Best Quotes
“A conclusion is simply the place where you got tired of thinking.”
“There is a stage you reach, Deagle thinks, a time somewhere in early middle age, when your past ceases to be about yourself. Your connection to your former life is like a dream or delirium, and that person who you once were is merely a fond acquaintance, or a beloved character from a storybook. This is how memory becomes nostalgia. They are two very different things - the same way that a person is different from a photograph of a person.”
“It had occurred to him that if the undead don't realize that they are dead, he might easily be one of them himself.”
“Here is the door of my mom's house, well-remembered childhood portal. Here is the yard, and a set of wires that runs from the house to a wooden pole, and some fat birds sitting together on the wires, five of them lined up like beads on an abacus.”
“I've been talking to myself a lot lately. I don't know what that's about, but my mother was the same way. She hated to make small talk with other people, but get her into a conversation with herself and she was quite the raconteur. She would tell herself a joke and clap her hands together as she let out a laugh; she would murmur to the plants as she watered them, and offer encouragement to the food as she cooked it. Sometimes I would walk into a room and surprise her as she was regaling herself with some delightful story, and I remember how the sound would dry up in her mouth. She stood there, frozen in the headlights of my teenage scorn.”
“There is your car and the open road, the fabled lure of random adventure. You stand at the verge, and you could become anything. Your future shifts and warps with your smallest step, your shitty little whims. The man you will become is at your mercy.”
“It is not like a premonition of death. It is as if she died a long time ago, and she just now remembered it.”
“He had built his own future brick by brick around himself but there were no doors or windows, at least that was the way it seemed at the time he had thought to himself, I am locked in, it was like one of those ghost stories where you wake up and you are sealed in a coffin.”
“Even when our death is imminent, we carry the image of ourselves moving forward, alive, into the future.”
“You really romanticize the white-trash period of your life,' Rain once said to me, which I thought was a little hurtful but perhaps true.”
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Book Keywords:
abacus, death, ghost-stories, mercy, door, tired, romanticize, conversation, adventure, hurtful, carry, true, future, white-trash, coffin, character, birds, headlights, zombies, talking, undead, photograph, childhood, open-road, brick, conclusion, nostalgia, image, thinking
