"Sometimes all the information is there in the first five minutes, laid out for inspection. Then it goes away, gets suppressed as a matter of pragmatism. It's too much to know a lot about strangers. But some don't end up strangers. They end up closer, and you had your five minutes to see what they were really like and you missed it."
. . . .
"I feel changed. Like, say, my mind is a sweater. And a loose thread gets tugged at, pulled and pulled until the sweater unravels and there's only a big fluffy pile of yarn. You can make something with it, that pile of yarn, but it will never be a sweater again. That's the state of things."
. . . .
" . . . it is easier to like difficult people when they are leaving, or already gone."
. . . .
"He loved to talk about the ways in which people were processed and accounted for in the modern world. Numbered street addresses, he said, were relatively new. In the Old World, there was a natural vetting process. . . A stranger enters a village and declares who he is looking for. He is either turned away or assisted, depending. How do we find each other?"
. . . .
"When you're young, being with someone else can almost seem like an event. It
is an event when you're young. But it isn't enough."
. . . .
"I have to find an arbitrary point inside the spell of waiting, the open absence, and tear myself away. Leave, with no answer. Move on to the next question."
- The Flamethrowers, Rachel Kushner
