Colson Whitehead

We never see other people anyway, only the monsters we make of them.

I can't blame modern technology for my predilection for distraction, not after all the hours I've spent watching lost balloons disappear into the clouds. I did it before the Internet, and I'll do it after the apocalypse, assuming we still have helium and weak-gripped children.

Nowdays, Rosie the Rivetere was a former soccer mom who had just opened her own catering business when Last Night came down and her husband and kids were eaten by a parking attendant at the local megamall__ discount- appliance emporium.

Most people say, __how, don__ tell,_ but I stand by Show and Tell, because when writers put their work out into the world, they__e like kids bringing their broken unicorns and chewed-up teddy bears into class in the sad hope that someone else will love them as much as they do.

A monster is a person who has stopped pretending.

Mark Spitz had met plenty of the divine-retribution folks over the months. This was their moment; they were umbrella salesmen standing outside a subway entrance in a downpour. The human race deserved the plague, we brought it on ourselves for poisoning the planet, for the Death of God, the calculated brutalities of the global economic system, for driving primordial species to extinction: the entire collapse of values as evidenced by everything from nuclear fission to reality television to alternate side of the street parking. Mark Spitz could only endure these harangues for a minute or two before he split. It was boring.The plague was the plague. You were wearing galoshes, or you weren't.

New York City in life was much like New York City in death. It was still hard to get a cab, for example.

A society manufactures the heroes it requires.

You are a New Yorker when what was there before is more real and solid than what is here now.

Why should anyone else have it easy. Spoken like a true New Yorker.

Maybe we become New Yorkers the day we realize that New York will go on without us.

New York City does not hold our former selves against us. Perhaps we can extend the same courtesy.

I'm here because I was born here and thus ruined for anywhere else, but I don't know about you.

Cherish your old apartments and pause for a moment when you pass them. Pay tribute, for they are the caretakers for your reinventions.

The city knows you better than any living person because it has seen you when you are alone.

As if these daily humiliations and sacrifices mean something, are tallied by the ones who keep the books. Tomorrow we pick up where we left off. Sleep tight. Sleep deep. Sleep the sleep of the successful because somehow you made it through the day without anyone finding out that you are a complete fraud.

Cora blamed the people who wrote it down. People always got things wrong, on purpose as much as by accident.

I'd never been much of an athlete, due to a physical condition I'd had since birth (unathleticism). Perhaps if there were a sport centered around lying on your couch in a neurotic stupor all day, I'd take an interest.