Miranda Popkey Quotes

Truth didn't help. Everything that had ever happened could never be integrated into something coherent. The trick was picking the right moments. The trick was knowing when to lie.

In the moments after she spoke I remember thinking that if she was in some way correct she was, however, not right. That of course life is random, a series of coincidences, etc., but that to live you must attempt to make sense of it, and that's what narrative's for. I believe this, people of a certain sensibility believe this. Mostly it's harmless. Though perhaps sometimes you find yourself doing things because you think the narrative arc calls for it, or because you've grown bored with your own plot, things you shouldn't do because they will, these things, hurt the other characters in your story, who are not characters after all, but people. But then people do evil often and with less elaborate justifications.

Telling people what you want, speaking desire, and I could hear the air quotes in her voice, the ones she used when she slipped into grad-school vernacular. It's like telling people how to hurt you, handing them instructions.

To flirt was to expose one's desires, an act inherently shaming.

Perhaps all this time I have been wrong about the story's protagonist, the man who runs out of road. Because he hasn't, not really. I mean, he can drive into the ocean. He can always decide to turn around.

I think," she said, "I thought I was telling you a story about how we fell in love." . . .

"What do you think the story is about now?" . . .

"Sometimes I think it's a story about being tricked. Not that he did it on purpose, but it wasn't accidental, him confiding in me, just then." Of course every confidence is a kind of manipulation. Or calculation. I trust you with this. Or maybe it's I want you to think that I trust you with this.