The largest website for English phrases and quotes

The largest website for English phrases and quotes

Category: Dan Chaon

I never understood why people from the 1980s thought there would be flying cars. It just seemed really dangerous and impractical to me, but they all talked about it, so it must have been a thing. Meanwhile, my dream for the future was that it wouldn’t involve mass extinction and large-scale water shortages and cannibalism.

apocalypse, future-prediction

I guess,” says Deagle, finally, “I’ll just have a pack of Marlboro Lights. That’s what I used to smoke when I was human.

human, marlboro, smoke

A conclusion is simply the place where you got tired of thinking.

conclusion, thinking, tired

You could say that they were sweet, or you could say that they were something out of a horror movie.

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.

adventure, mercy, open-road

You know what you learn when you study the legal system? Poor people pass down damage the way rich people pass down an inheritance.

It had occurred to him that if the undead don’t realize that they are dead, he might easily be one of them himself.

undead, zombies

Your Mom’s Car. Think about that. Try to wrap your brain around the supernatural and spiritual implications that the name bears down you. Your Mom’s Car, holding its hand out straight, fingers curled, a zombie reaching for your neck.

cars, childhood-trauma, dead-parents, metaphor, personification

The true terror Jonah thought the true mystery of life was not that we are all going to die but that we were all born that we were all once little babies like this unknowing and slowly reeling in the world gathering it loop by loop like a ball of string. The true terror was that we once didn’t exist and then through no fault of our own we had to.

The desire to remake that shrinking expanse of life they were still allotted, to make use of it, to fill it up with possibility. Oh please: one more transformation.

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.

hurtful, romanticize, true, white-trash

It’s very hard — weirdly hard — to clear your mind of all that crap so that you can just sit down and write and find that place where you’re just involved and enjoying the imaginary place you’ve discovered. All the other “problems” with writing are just puzzles, and they can be interesting to try to crack, even when it’s frustrating.

writing-process