The Dangers of Smoking in Bed

At that age there’s music playing in your head all the time, as if a radio were transmitting from the nape of your neck, inside your skull. Then one day that music starts to grow softer, or it just stops. When that happens, you’re no longer a teenager.

For Paul and for Chatwin, our kitten

one thing was sure: nighttime butterflies turned to dust in your fingers, as if they had no organs or blood, almost like the still cigarette ash in the ashtray if you barely touched it

once I’d gotten over my savage crush on Ippolit, the teenager with tuberculosis in The Idiot, which lasted over a year

I wanted pornography: sick people like Helen, Tadzio, or Ippolit were eroticism, suggestion. And they were always secondary characters.

Ippolit was ideal: beautiful (Dostoyevsky made sure to have Prince Myshkin describe his “lovely face,” a line that always made me tremble), adolescent, definitively dying and stubborn and vulnerable and wicked. But he talked a lot and fainted little: I was tired of reading descriptions of paleness and sweating and coughing. I wanted details, I wanted explicit sex.

I only became friends with him that summer when all my other friends decided to become assholes—otherwise known as the summer when I decided to hate all my friends

So some of him lived but the most of him died.
RUDYARD KIPLING, “THE VAMPIRE”

Both of us hated the people who got drunk to the point of vomiting or acting ridiculous and making pathetic confessions, so we would sip our whiskeys slowly and criticize everyone else.

There were many Jessicas, because most of the missing kids were teenage girls. They took off with an older guy, or got scared by a pregnancy. They fled from a drunken father, from a stepfather who raped them in the early morning, from a brother who masturbated onto their backs at night. They went out to the club and got drunk and lost a couple of days, and then were afraid to come home.