Margo's Got Money Troubles

“Love was not something, I realized, that came to you from outside. I had always thought that love was supposed to come from other people, and somehow, I was failing to catch the crumbs of it, failing to eat them, and I went around belly empty and desperate. I didn’t know that love was supposed to come from within me, and that as long as I loved others, the strength and warmth of that love would fill me, make me strong.”

“You are about to begin reading a new book, and to be honest, you are a little tense. The beginning of a novel is like a first date. You hope that from the first lines an urgent magic will take hold, and you will sink into the story like a hot bath, giving yourself over entirely. But this hope is tempered by the expectation that, in reality, you are about to have to learn a bunch of people's names and follow along politely like you are attending the baby shower of a woman you hardly know. And that's fine, goodness knows you've fallen in love with books that didn't grab you in the first paragraph. But that doesn't stop you from wishing they would, from wishing they would come right up to you in the dark of your mind and kiss you on the throat.”

“I laughed. “What the fuck is Goodreads?”

“Because that's all art is, in the end. One person trying to get another person they have never met to fall in love with them.”

“The sadness from the morning didn’t exactly go away; it dried on me and slowly crumbled, leaving me covered in little flakes, like if you eat a glazed donut in a black shirt. That was how it was being a grown-up. We were all moving through the world like that, like those river dolphins that look pink only because they’re so covered in scars.”

“And since she wanted to be good, she's always been careful not to care too much about money. Now she wondered if all those Disney movies were merely propaganda to keep poor people content with their lot. 'We may be poor, but we're the salt of the earth, we know what really matters. The rich are perverted by their hideous wealth - why, look at that Cruella de Vil!' But good or evil, even single dollar was power. Power to hire a lawyer, power to control how she spent her time, power to change her appearance, power to command respect. Power to be who she wanted to be.”

“There is a desperation to a novel that is unsettling. The world so painstakingly re-created in miniature; this tiny diorama made of words. Why go to all this trouble, to create me, to seduce you, to enumerate so many different breakfast cereals? To make the cunning tiny apartment, the itsy-bitsy Jinx? It's like going to meet your new boyfriend's family for the first time and discovering they are all paid actors. It's almost easier to believe I'm real than to understand what's actually going on. The desperation that could have caused anyone to invent me in the first place. The urgency and need that would require creating an imaginary space of this size and level of detail.And it really makes you wonder: What kind of truth would require this many lies to tell?”

“You need to be someone worth falling in love with- you teach them how to love you by showing them who you are.”

“In Lady and the Tramp there is this moment where Tramp finally gets a collar, and it’s a symbol of being loved. If you get taken to the pound, someone is gonna come get you. The dog catcher is different with a dog wearing a collar. A dog without a collar is just an animal. If the world doesn’t know you are loved, then you’re trash. I think that’s even true of people. Maybe. Sometimes. Or I fear it is. That being loved is the only way to be safe.”

“I’m just saying,” Jinx said, seemingly more lucid now, “when you’re lost in the deep dark forest, the thing to do isn’t to get scared of the trees. You have to find your way out again.”

“Who cared about sex, really? When what you needed was someone to talk to in the dark.”

“I like getting to be the me now watching the past me. It's almost a way of loving myself. Stroking the cheek of that girl with my understanding. Smoothing her hair in my mind's eye.”

“You can't tell me that if it was men and a medical decision would result in their penis splitting open and them not being able to hold their pee for the rest of their life, they wouldn't think that should be their own decision.”

“And I knew something bad had happened, that his feelings had shifted. Normally, there was a cord of attachment between us that I could tug and feel him there on the other end. I suddenly had the horrifying sensation that it had been snipped off, and now I had a cord that led nowhere, that was just dangling in space.”

“It seemed improbable that men really wanted sex this badly, and yet they did, there was an entire economy based on how badly they wanted it, and for a moment Margo understood the sexual desire she felt was mild in comparison She would never pay fifteen dollars to look at a guy naked.”

“What she liked most about sex was that feeling of all the normal posturing and social rules falling away; the giddy panic of realizing you've lost control and you're not getting it back. Instead, you're just helplessly writhing, victim of an ancient itch.”

“we’d be young forever, and we would scream to the crowd, “Look at me! Look at the beautiful, insane things I can do with my body! Look at me! Love me!” Because that’s all art is, in the end. One person trying to get another person they have never met to fall in love with them.”

“People are all so lonely. Even when they do horrible things, it often comes down to that, if only you take the time to understand them. It seemed like that should mean the world could be better, that people could help each other, like Jesus said. And yet that’s not what happens. That hardly ever seems to happen at all.”

“And it really makes you wonder: What kind of truth would require this many lies to tell?”

“She felt so far away from who she’d been and with no easy way to explain who she was now.”

“It's because you know. It's because you're in control of it! That is what makes someone slutty or not slutty! Think about it. If a girl doesn't know she's hot and is innocently going about her business, and some guys spy on her naked, she's not a slut. But if she knows guys want to see her naked and charges them money to spy on her, she's a slut. The same physical thing is happening in both scenarios, guys see her naked body, it's just in the second one she knows what's going on and she's in control.”

“Everyone had always known, could see that there was something about me that wasn’t worth investing in. The way they could so easily throw me away.”

“When that grew boring, she scrolled Twitter, which was like being bathed in the dirty water of other people's thoughts. On Instagram, she was in a deep, deep ad loop.”

“It was fun: making things up, pulling each detail out of the dark of my mind like a rabbit from a hat.”

“But when they talked about the opportunities she would be missing, she’d thought they meant a four-year college. She hadn’t understood they meant that every single person she met, every new friend, every love interest, every employer, every landlord, would judge her for having made what they all claimed was the “right” choice.”

“I'd wondered about the phrase "Hungry Ghost" when Mark first wrote that poem. What did he mean by it? How could ghosts be hungry? But it made perfect sense to me now: The longing for the food you could no longer eat The memory of of having a body. People were constantly giving ghosts food, offerings of persimmons and oranges, pan de muerto on the Day of the Dead; even Halloween was about nothing so much as candy. What the Dead wanted, above all else, was to eat, to cram their mouths full, to feel the calories flood their bloodstream, to be part of it again: life. Bloody, squirming, pulsing, hungry life.”

“There was no changing Mark, or Jinx, or Cheyanne, or how the world worked. They were like chess pieces; they moved how the moved. If you wanted to win, you couldn't dwell on how you wished they would move, or how it would be fairer if they moved a different way. You had to adapt.”

“That was one of the things Mark had told her, that as far as neuroscience was concerned, free will couldn’t be real. That our brains only invented explanations, justifications for what our body was already getting ready to do. That consciousness was a fabulous illusion. We were inferring our own state of mind the same way we inferred the minds of others: thinking someone is mad when they frown, sad when they cry. We feel the physiological sensation of anger and we think, I’m mad because Tony stole my banana! But we’re just making stuff up, fairy tales to explain the deep dark woods of being alive.”

“I couldn’t force you to do a damn thing, Margo. You are wilder than anyone I’ve ever known.”And I liked that he called me that, even though the things Mark said about me never felt like they really had anything to do with me. They were more his fantasy of me.”

“I’ve been thinking, JB wrote. When you fall in love with a book, is it the character or the author you’re falling in love with? HungryGhost: I mean, I guess both? JB: And only one of them is real. True, I admitted. JB: And the fake one is the only one you get to actually know. But you can kind of feel the author under there, beneath the surface of the fake world you’re inhabiting. Their imagination is the water you’re swimming in, the air you’re breathing. They’ve made every table and every chair and every person in the whole book. I couldn’t breathe. JB: I’m just saying, even if everything you wrote me was a lie (and I know, not ALL of it was a lie, but even if it was!), then in some sense I would still know you, at least as well as I feel I know Neal Stephenson or William Gibson or whatever, and honestly, I feel like I know them better than I know anyone in the world. Do you know what I mean?”