The night breathed through the apartment like a dark animal. The ticking of a clock. The groan of a floorboard as he slipped out of his room. All was drowned by its silence. But Jacob loved the night. He felt it on his skin like a promise. Like a cloak woven from freedom and danger.

Outside the stars were paled by the glaring lights of the city, and the large apartment was stale with his mother’s sorrow.

HEATHER CHANDLER, Veronica in tow, hits the Country Club Kids with a salvo of false pleasantness, capped by a scowling smile.

Alone at a table in the Siberia of the cafeteria, MARTHA
finishes a forkful of chicken.

A coolly coed cabal of Country Club Kids icily eye the approaching VERONICA and HEATHER CHANDLER.

I like less naturalistic writing. Now the criticism you get is, ‘People don’t talk like that.’ My feeling is, ‘Hey man, I’m making a movie. Do people talk like they do in Casablanca? No.’ I like the older movies where you were allowed to have almost show-offy dialogue. You didn’t have to have everything be played real. I like something beyond real.

I leave it till the last minute. And then I leave it some more. Eventually, I leave it till I’m desperate. … I always think, I’m not ready to write it, I don’t know what I’m doing, it’s just a jumble of thoughts in a state of flux, there’s no story, I don’t know how A connects to B, I don’t know anything! I get myself into a genuine state of panic. … Normally, I’ll leave it till the deadline, and I haven’t even started writing. This has become, over the years, a week beyond the deadline, or even more. It can be a week—or weeks—past the delivery date, and I haven’t started writing. In fact, I don’t have delivery dates any more. I go by the start-of-preproduction date. I consider that to be my real deadline. And then I miss that. It’s a cycle that I cannot break. I simply can’t help it. It makes my life miserable.

Why did dogs make one want to cry? There was something so quiet and hopeless about their sympathy.

I wondered how many people there were in the world who suffered, and continued to suffer because they could not break out from their own web of shyness and reserve, and in their blindness and folly built up a great distorted wall in front of them that hid the truth.

…he blew out his match and his flash of confidence at the same time.

Poor whims of fancy, tender and unharsh. They are the enemy to bitterness and regret, and sweeten this exile we have brought upon ourselves.

In height he was rather over six feet, and so excessively lean that he seemed to be considerably taller. His eyes were sharp and piercing, save during those intervals of torpor to which I have alluded; and his thin, hawk-like nose gave his whole expression an air of alertness and decision. His chin, too, has the prominence and squareness which mark the man of determination. His hands were invariably blotted with ink and stained with chemicals, yet he was possessed of extraordinary delicacy of touch, as I frequently had occasion to observe when I watched him manipulating his fragile philosophical instruments

I thought of her in that cold ruined house, with night birds keening over her and rain gentle all around, dying of breathing.

Part of the debtor mentality is a constant, frantically suppressed undercurrent of terror. We have one of the highest debt-to-income ratios in the world, and apparently most of us are two paychecks from the street. Those in power—governments, employers—exploit this, to great effect. Frightened people are obedient—not just physically, but intellectually and emotionally. If your employer tells you to work overtime, and you know that refusing could jeopardize everything you have, then not only do you work the overtime, but you convince yourself that you’re doing it voluntarily, out of loyalty to the company; because the alternative is to acknowledge that you are living in terror. Before you know it, you’ve persuaded yourself that you have a profound attachment to some vast multi-national corporation: you’ve indentured not just your working hours, but your entire thought process. The only people who are capable of either unfettered action or unfettered thought are those who—either because they’re heroically brave, or because they’re insane, or because they know themselves to be safe—are free from fear.

Our entire society’s based on discontent: people wanting more and more and more, being constantly dissatisfied with their homes, their bodies, their decor, their clothes, everything. Taking it for granted that that’s the whole point of life, never to be satisfied. If you’re perfectly happy with what you’ve got—specifically if what you’ve got isn’t all that spectacular—then you’re dangerous. You’re breaking all the rules, you’re undermining the sacred economy, you’re challenging every assumption that society’s built on. That’s why Rafe’s dad throws a mickey fit whenever Rafe say he’s happy where he is. The way he sees it, we’re all subversives. We’re traitors.

If you’ve ever seen a dead body, you know how they change the air: that huge silence, the absence as strong as a black hole, time stopped and molecules frozen around the still thing that’s learned the secret, the one he can never tell. Most dead people are the only thing in the room. Murder victims are different; they don’t come alone. The silence rises up to a deafening shout and the air is streaked and hand-printed, the body smokes with the brand of that other person grabbing you just as hard: the killer.