I forgot how much I love to read

I haven’t put off work and stayed up late to finish a book instead in years. Not since high school. It felt good.

That moment right before the climax when you become absolutely hooked, when you can’t wait to read what the author had been building up to all this time, when something pivotal happens. And the anticipation for the downhill whooosh of the roller coaster as the book unwinds to its conclusion, that goes by faster that you even realize. Then the moment when you turn the last page, expecting more. But there isn’t.

And then your immediately stuck by a kind of grief, after you begrudgingly go home after a unexpectedly fun late night out, or as if your parting with a close friend.

Some of my favorite quotes from the book:

“Imagining the future is a kind of nostalgia. (…) You just use the future to escape the present.”

“That is the fear: I have lost something important, and I cannot find it, and I need it. It is fear like if someone lost his glasses and went to the glasses store and they told him that the world had run out of glasses and he would just have to do without.”

That’s why I’m going. So I don’t have to wait until I die to start seeking a Great Perhaps.”

“I wanted so badly to lie down next to her on the couch, to wrap my arms around her and sleep. Not fuck, like in those movies. Not even have sex. Just sleep together in the most innocent sense of the phrase. But I lacked the courage and she had a boyfriend and I was gawky and she was gorgeous and I was hopelessly boring and she was endlessly fascinating. So I walked back to my room and collapsed on the bottom bunk, thinking that if people were rain, I was drizzle and she was hurricane.”

“And then something invisible snapped insider her, and that which had come together commenced to fall apart.”

“The only way out of the labyrinth of suffering is to forgive.”

The book is endlessly quotable, like, ugh. I need to read it again.