NOS4A2

Highlights

You could look at birds all your life without ever knowing what was a sparrow and what was a blackbird, but we all know a swan when we see it. So it was with cars. Maybe you could not tell a Firebird from a Fiero, but when you saw a Rolls-Royce, you knew it.

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She breathed deeply of the scent of decaying fiction, disintegrating history, and forgotten verse, and she observed for the first time that a room full of books smelled like dessert: a sweet snack made of figs, vanilla, glue, and cleverness.

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So many of man’s inventions—the syringe, the sword, the pen, the gun—were metaphorical cocks, but the internal combustion engine had to have been dreamt up by a man who had looked upon the human heart.

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She couldn’t afford to ignore a single good idea. Could anyone?

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The difference between childhood and adulthood, Vic had come to believe, was the difference between imagination and resignation. You traded one for the other and lost your way.

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