170 Quotes by Dan Chaon

A conclusion is simply the place where you got tired of thinking.

People can find patterns in all kinds of random events. It's called apophenia. It's the tendency we humans have to find meaning in disconnected information.

You look up for a moment and you're not sure which life is real. You've split yourself into so many honeycombed parts that they barely notice each other---all of them pacing, concurrently, parallel streams of though, and each one thinks of its self as me.

There is a stage you reach, Deagle thinks, a time somewhere in early middle age, when your past ceases to be about yourself. Your connection to your former life is like a dream or delirium, and that person who you once were is merely a fond acquaintance, or a beloved character from a storybook. This is how memory becomes nostalgia. They are two very different things - the same way that a person is different from a photograph of a person.

Even when our death is imminent, we carry the image of ourselves moving forward, alive, into the future.

There is your car and the open road, the fabled lure of random adventure. You stand at the verge, and you could become anything. Your future shifts and warps with your smallest step, your shitty little whims. The man you will become is at your mercy.

We leave such a trail of bodies through our teens and twenties that it's hard to tell which one is us. How many versions do we abandon over the years

I guess," says Deagle, finally, "I'll just have a pack of Marlboro Lights. That's what I used to smoke when I was human.

Here is the door of my mom's house, well-remembered childhood portal. Here is the yard, and a set of wires that runs from the house to a wooden pole, and some fat birds sitting together on the wires, five of them lined up like beads on an abacus.