Quotes from Adam Haslett

An old impatience returned, the kind I had experienced when I started as a therapist: the urge to search for the moments in their past that contained the key to liberating them in the present.

All in all, we were about as close as siblings could be. Which meant we monitored each other's responsibility for the family, watchful for any sign of defection, as though we were on a desert island together, each surreptitiously building an escape raft that the other occasionally burned.

Imagine me gone, imagine it's just the two of you. What do you do?

How narrowly we all avoid having never been.

Kind of gay? I wanted to say. Do you have any notion how many homosexuals sweated their ass off on the dance floor to make this soaring bit of derivative trash possible? How many died of AIDS, OD'd, or went broke on the way to that girl from Texas cutting a deal...

We'd become friends, of the sort men often are, in that we daily confirmed each other's existence but pretty much left it at that.

I'm going to say this once,' he said, 'so you had better listen. You're twelve years old and you have a lot of ideas in your head, but nothing will wreck you quicker than if you let yourself confuse what's real and what isn't, you hear me?

I hadn't expected much from the place, but I hadn't realized how ugly it would be, either. We

He's in that larva stage, the damp, pained shedding of the child's body. This is what boarding school is for. To store them away during years like this, so they can suffer without the embarrassment of their parents watching.

It's worth it, I thought. Just for this, for a few moments of the almost sublime, even if I had to half talk my way into it, and allow myself the cliché of being impressed by Niagara Falls.

His family seemed, more than anything, incurious about one another. As if they'd known one another well in the past bu had moved on now and resented, without saying as much, the need to keep up.

I guess the lesson is, wherever you go, life follows you there, hunts you down, and abducts you (just kidding).

This is the thing I have discovered: Michael's being gone doesn't mean we stop trying to save him. The strain is less but it doesn't vanish. It becomes part of our bewilderment, a kind of activity without motive, which provides its own strange continuity.

It seemed as if a glaze had been washed from my senses, brightening the sound of the traffic up ahead on the avenue, separating the bus's pneumatic brakes from the bass chug of the delivery-truck engines and the whir and bump of gliding taxis.

The present had somehow ceased to be an emergency.

I had received an invisible and highly effective surgery to the mind, administered by a pale yellow tablet scored down the middle and no larger than an aspirin. There is so much drivel about psychoactive meds, so much corruption, bad faith, over- and underprescription, vagueness, profiteering, ignorance, and hope, that it's easy to forget they sometimes work, alleviating real suffering, at least for a time.

But holding Michael had always been like holding a little person, who knew that his feeding would end, who knew that if you were picked up you would be put down, that the comfort came but also went. Without knowing what it was, I'd felt that tension in his little groping arms and fitful legs, the discomfort of the foreknowledge

Her parents were religious people who never renounced their obligation to love their daughter or their obligation to be ashamed.

the motion of our blood could almost stop, our bodies be laid to sleep, but somehow the soul be kept alive. Simply by the things we saw and heard, in any given moment

There was just the sensation of it. A

I did what most kids do when their world feels destroyed. I tried to care less about what remained...This was untrue, of course.

I was failing to accomplish whatever I might be capable of, a prophecy that seemed to fulfill itself more with each passing year as I fell behind friends and acquaintances in their patchwork progress toward building their adult lives.

Confidence. That's the word that came to mind, one that I would never before have used to describe any part of my life.

Against the monster, I've always wanted meaning. Not for its own sake, because in the usual course of things, who needs the self-consciousness of it? Let meaning be immanent, noted in passing, if at all. But that won't do when the monster has its funnel driven into the back of your head and is sucking the light coming through your eyes straight out of you into the mouth of oblivion. So like a cripple I long for what others don't notice they have: ordinary meaning.