“ All close friendships are marked with competition. Our earliest tests are against our siblings and playmates, and some of that rivalry endures amongst friends into adulthood. Like dogs play fighting,… Christopher Bollen
“ Sometimes it seemed like the whole point of life was not to die the same death as your father. Christopher Bollen
“ Maybe, in the end, a home is a place where you have no other choice but to stay. Christopher Bollen
“ You know how hard it is to actually touch the world? To make a mark on it? You die and they bury you in it. Christopher Bollen
“ I’m not some outdated alarm company, like Muldoon Security, singular. I’m offering a whole new variety of services, plural—water testing, soil graphs, toxic air readings, the security of this century.… Christopher Bollen
“ If the Internet were planet Earth, the amount of space devoted to pregnancies, motherhood, infants, and toddlers would surely fill a continent. Of course, the Internet had an enormous investment in th… Christopher Bollen
“ The Greeks used to say that gods and animals were born whole. It is only humans who need to develop, that they become complete only with the help of a community. It’s the state of that community that… Christopher Bollen
“ To discover someone was ordinary always struck Mills as a kind of betrayal. Whenever a man Mills presumed was gay turned out to be straight, the aura about him crumbled, the clues reassembling into th… Christopher Bollen
“ They were young and gay and the femininity of their teenage years had only recently hardened into the muscle of a competitive sexual economy. Their muscles met the demands of the city, and the city me… Christopher Bollen
“ Now young people have the Internet and a zillion phone apps so you don’t need an actual place to congregate. You can be everywhere, nowhere, a floating message-spewing entity. We used to rely on drugs… Christopher Bollen
“ I’ve always looked like this—in between. Is there ever an age when a person looks exactly like themselves? Christopher Bollen
“ Mills was experienced enough to understand what gay men were often forced to be in this world: romantic opportunists. Christopher Bollen
“ That’s what children eventually were for their aging parents: custodians of technology, free personal IT departments keeping them from disappearing forever from the universal cloud. Christopher Bollen
“ He tried to imagine the handsome couple by the refrigerator as two sweaty bodies in a bedroom, one on top of the other. Which did what to the other? Mills kept rotating the two men in his mind, which… Christopher Bollen
