“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.”
— Dan Chaon
“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.”
— Dan Chaon
“We leave such a trail of bodies through our teens and twenties that it’s hard to tell which one is us. How many versions do we abandon over the years”
— Dan Chaon
“It had occurred to him that if the undead don’t realize that they are dead, he might easily be one of them himself.”
— Dan Chaon
“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.”
— Dan Chaon
“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.”
— Dan Chaon
“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.”
— Dan Chaon
“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.”
— Dan Chaon
“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.”
— Dan Chaon
“I can’t understand how people can settle for having just one life. I remember we were in English class and we were talking about that poem by – that one guy. David Frost. ‘Two roads diverged in a yellow wood-‘ You know this poem, right? ‘Two roads diverged in a yellow wood, and sorry I could not travel both and be one traveler, long I stood and looked down one as far as I could, to where it bent in the undergrowth-“”I loved that poem. But I remember thinking to myself: Why? How come you can’t travel both? That seemed really unfair to me.”
— Dan Chaon
“Outside, the sleet had gotten thicker. You could hear it pebbling against the large glass windows, you could see it swirling wildly through the spotlights of street lamps. It was the kind of night when you might expect to see a skeleton flying through the air, its ragged black shroud flapping in the wind.”
— Dan Chaon
“People can find patterns in all kinds of random events. It’s called apophenia. It’s the tendency we humans have to find meaning in disconnected information.”
— Dan Chaon
“You look up for a moment and you’re not sure which life is real. You’ve split yourself into so many honeycombed parts that they barely notice each other—all of them pacing, concurrently, parallel streams of though, and each one thinks of its self as me.”
— Dan Chaon
“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.”
— Dan Chaon
“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.”
— Dan Chaon
“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.”
— Dan Chaon
“A conclusion is simply the place where you got tired of thinking.”
— Dan Chaon
“You could say that they were sweet, or you could say that they were something out of a horror movie.”
— Dan Chaon
“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.”
— Dan Chaon
“You know what you learn when you study the legal system? Poor people pass down damage the way rich people pass down an inheritance.”
— Dan Chaon
“Their house was about a mile outside of town. The kids would play outdoors, in the backyard and the large stubble field behind the house. Dusk seemed to last for hours, and when it was finally dark they would sit under the porch light, catching thickly buzzing June bugs and moths, or even an occasional toad who hopped into the circle of light, tempted by the halo of insects that floated around the bare orange lightbulb next to the front door”
— Dan Chaon
“Hesitantly, I touched the stump where my finger used to be. In my mind, something almost remembered itself, but the fumes of turpentine were making me a little lightheaded; whatever memory was on the verge of coughing itself up was gone even before it materialized. Out the window, I could see a squirrel was stumbling erratically around in circles underneath the old basketball net. Then I realized that it wasn’t a squirrel; it was a brown paper bag.”
— Dan Chaon
“I realized that I had the choice. I could give this moment a meaning, or I could choose to ignore it. It just depended on the kind of story I wanted to tell myself.”
— Dan Chaon
“What happened to us? It was a question that interested her. Most people seemed to believe that they were experts of their own life story. They had a set of memories that they strung like beads, and this necklace told a sensible tale. But she suspected that most of these stories would fall apart under strict examination–that, in fact, we were only peeping through a keyhole of our lives, and the majority of the truth, the reality of what happened to us, was hidden. Memories were no more solid than dreams…What happened to us? She drew smoke, considering the question. Was it possible that we would never really know? What if we were not, actually, the curators of our own lives?”
— Dan Chaon
“We are always telling stories to ourselves, about ourselves…But we can control those stories…I believe that! Events in our life have meaning because we choose to give it to them”
— Dan Chaon
“I guess I always thought it would be bigger, when a terrible thing happened. Didn’t you think so? Doesn’t it seem like houses ought to be caving in, and lightning and thunder, and people tearing their hair in the street? I never – I never thought it would be this small, did you?”
— Dan Chaon
“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.”
— Dan Chaon
“You want a child because it is a link in the bridge that you are building between the past and the future, a cantilever that holds you, so that you are not alone.”
— Dan Chaon
“Even when our death is imminent, we carry the image of ourselves moving forward, alive, into the future.”
— Dan Chaon