To feel joined in a collective that knows how personal and heartbreaking a cultural betrayal can be, and to share the feeling of being met where one is, at odds with surrendering, disappointed it isn’t another way.

A certain kind of glamor resides not just in possessing a void like the great emptiness—which lends the person who holds it an air of depth, impenetrability, and mystery—but in one’s reaching for destructive, impulsive, or obsessive remedies to fill that void.

A kind of reading that doesn’t just describe what happened in a story, but actually performs it. The only way to read the story is to play it, and the only way to play the story is to do it, to completely embody it.

Awe is a kind of surprise that resists pity or cynicism. It is not relative or subjective. It’s an active and dynamic process that cannot be separated from its twin concept, wonder.

Whatever answers are to be found lie in the blank space around them, that looming, claustrophobic blankness. Snow. Shame. History. Monstrosity. The steaming, stinking heap of it. Carson lets it answer for itself.

I am taken by the unique vibration his work strikes deep in my organs, how different these internal resonances are from how DeLillo is regularly discussed in the contemporary landscape—how his work makes me feel, to be blunt about it.

I suspect that everything I do or say after 11 pm is lunatic. Panic about it at 5 am. In real life a police officer shoots a man twenty times in his own backyard. Is there someplace else to stand? No. (Shaved pubes.)