Sol Luckman

“So it was a crossroads summer, when the universe seemed to stand perilously still like an egg wobbling on a precipice, a regular rite of passage summer that saw us traverse the hazardous divide between the illusions of boyhood and the far more pernicious deceptions of maturity, et cetera.”

“Life is too short to waste being a productive member of society.”

“Recalling his first dreams of flight when he was a small child, Max acknowledged that his entire existence had been building up to this tipping point where he could finally choose to release his self-imposedlimitations.”

“The scene sucker-punched Max. He never saw it coming. It encapsulated in one poignant instant the tragic beauty of his family history.”

“The evidence never seemed to matter to those in power, who had already made up their minds and did what people typically do when their worldview is threatened by new data: they attacked the messenger.”

“Such is life, imaginary or otherwise: a continuous parting of ways, a constant flux of approximation and distanciation, lines of fate intersecting at a point which is no-time, a theoretical crossroads fictitiously 'present,' an unstable ice floe forever drifting between was and will be.”

“Well, enough of this introspection. It’s depressing, quite frankly.”

“Over the years most of my peers had come to hate me—I never understood why. I guess I was just different and, like dogs, they could smell it. So I never had many friends.”

“Spanish—how shall I say this?—is likePortuguese spoken with a speech impediment.”

“True, beneath the human façade, I was an interloper, an alien whose ship had crashed beyond hope of repair in the backwoods of Southern Appalachia—but at least I’d learned to walk and talk enough like the locals to be rejected as one of their own.”

“It takes money to make money, even begging. Humans are herd animals. If a stranger’s bleeding to death beside the road, most people won’t stop to offer a Band-Aid. But get the ball rolling with a couple Good Samaritans, and before you know it you’ve got more eager philanthropists than you know what to do with.”

“He knew perfectly well (even if he wasn’t inclined to admit it) that the material body had a spiritual aspect. He knew that “spirit,” however explained, was real, because of his own undeniable experiences—which, though he might suppress them, he couldn’t altogether erase from memory.”

“The biggest question, transcending physics and the realm of how he was able to do the extraordinary things he did, remained firmly rooted in the realm of metaphysics and begged an answer to why he could do these things.”

“Unhealthy behavior is actually common among doctors, who tend to know a lot about medicine but very little about health.”

“Have you ever noticed how good things go to those who hate?”

“It was a rotten time to try to be a man in America. Until Blue came along I’d never even spent time around a man. Hell, I’d never even seen one. Where were all the men in this once great land?”

“With the sensation that he was passing through the Looking-Glass, Max stared at his father as if he had never seen him before—simultaneously impressed and unnerved at the thought that, after all these years, he still knew so little about him.”

“Begging is much more difficult than it looks. Contrary to popular belief, it’s a high art form that takes years of dedicated practice to master.”

“The beauty of a metaphor is it doesn't have to be real to ring true. The instant a metaphor becomes true it ceases to be a metaphor, which suggests a disconnect between truth and what's commonly referred to as reality.”

“I am, as it were, the created creating—a paradox, for all its rhetorical trappings, at the beating heart of our shared human journey, and one I invite you to struggle with just as I have while, day in and day out, word by word and line by line, constructing a fictitious autobiography for myself in these pages.”