Skippy Dies - Murry

• Apart from being a genius, which he is, Ruprecht does not have all that much going for him. A hamster-cheeked boy with a chronic weight problem, he is bad at sports and most other facets of life not involving complicated mathematical equations, that is why he savors his doughnut-eating victories so, and why, even though Skippy has been on the flor for almost a minute now, Ruprecht is still sitting there in his chair, chuckling to himself and saying, exultantly, under his breath, 'Yes, yes'- until the table jolts and his Coke goes flying, and he realizes that something is wrong.

• You know, you spend your childhood watching TV, assuming that at some point in the future everything you see there will one day happen to you: that you too will win a Formula One race, hop a train, foil a group of terrorists, tell someone 'Give me the gun', etc. Then you start secondary school, and suddenly everyone's asking you about your carrear plans and your long tem goals, and by goals they don't mean the kind you are planning to score in the FA Cup. Gradually the awful truth dawns on you: that Santa Claus was just the tip of the iceberg- that your future will not be the rollercoaster ride you'd imagined, that the world occupied by your parent, the world of washing the dishes, going to the dentist, weekend trips to the DIY superstore to buy floor tiles, is actually largely what people mean when speak of 'life.' Now, with every day that passes, another door seems to close, the one marked PROFESSIONAL STUNTMAN, OR FIGHT EVEIL ROBOT, until as the weeks go by and the doors -- GET BITTEN BY SNAKE, SAVE WORLD FROM ASTEROID, DISMANTLE BOMB WITH SECONDS TO SPARE -- keep closing, you begin to hear the sound as a good thing, and start closing some yourself, even the ones that didn't necessarily need to be closed...

• It's not that Howard doesn't love her. He does, he would do anything for her, lay down his life if it came to it -- if for example she were a princess menaced by a fire-breathing dragon, and he a knight on horseback, he would charge in with his lance without a second thought, stare the serpent right in its smoldering igneous eye, even if it meant getting barbecued there on the spot. But the fact is -- the fact is that they live in a world of facts, one of which is that there are no dragons, there are only the pale torpid days, stringing by one like another, a clouded necklace of imitation pearls, and a love binding him to a life he never actually chose. Is this all it's ever going to be? A grey tapestry of okayness? Frozen in a moment he drifted into?

• In fact, maybe it is love after all. Why can't we fall in love with a theory? Is it a person we fall in love with, or the idea of a person?... The question of reason, then, the question of evidence, these are wasted on him. Since when has love ever looked for reasons, or evidence? Why would love bow to the reality of things, when it creates a reality of its own, so much more vivid, wherein everything resonates to the key of the heart?

• He is thinking about asymmetry. This is a world, he i thinking where you can lie in bed, listening to a song as you dream about someone you love, and your feelings and the music will resonate so powerfully and completely that it seems impossible that the beloved, whoever and wherever he or she might be, should not know, should not pick up this signal as it pulsates from your heart, merged into one force that can be channelled out into the darkness to bring them this message. But in actuality, not only we he or she not know, there is nothing to stop that other person from lying on his or her bed at the exact same moment listening to the exact same song and thinking about someone else entirely - from aiming those identical feelings in some completely opposite direction, at some totally other person, who may in turn be lying in the dark thinking of another person still, a fourth, who is thinking of a fifth, and so on, and so on; so that rather than a universe of neatly reciprocating pairs, love, and love-returned fluttering through space nicely and symmetrically like so many pairs of butterfly wings, instead we get chains of yearning, which sprawl and meander and culminate in an infinite number of dead ends.

• And she realizes that love doesn't go in straight lines, it doesn't care about right or wrong or about being a good person or even about making you happy; and she sees, like in a vision, that life and the future are going to be way more complicated and difficult. In that same moment she feels herself grow older, like she's finished a level in a video game and moved on invisibly to the next stage, it's a tiredness that takes over her body, a tiredness like nothing before, like she's swallowed a ton weight...

• 'It's a good example of how history works,' Howard says. 'We tend to think of it as something solid and unchanging, appearing out of nowhere etched in stone like the Ten Commandments. But in history, in the end, is only another kind of story, and stories are different from the truth. The truth is messy and chaotic and all over the place. Often it just doesn't make sense. Stories make things make sense, but the way they do that is to leave out anything that doesn't fit. And often that is quite a lot.

• The feebler his grip on the present, the more vivid the past -- which for so long he has let disappear behind him, a frothing wake swallowed in the cold endless ocean of a world's lived lives.