I’d like to think I will remember this particular moon, seen from the particular angle of this balcony on this night, but if I forget, I will never know that I’ve forgotten, as is the nature of forgetting. I’ve forgotten so much—almost all I’ve seen. Experience washes over us in great waves. Memory is a drop caught in a flask, concentrated and briny, nothing like the fresh abundance from which it came. -Page 257

It’s wind chimes and helicopters, I said. And it’s muscle cars and leaf blowers and trash trucks picking up everyone’s bins and tossing them back like tequila shots. It’s coyotes yipping like delinquents who’ve just left lit firecrackers in a mailbox, and it’s mourning doves sitting on power lines practicing the same sad four-note riff. It’s the thrum of hummingbird wings and the silent gliding gyres of vultures and the long-legged stepping of white egrets through shallow green water in the concrete channel that’s the river. It’s dance music pounding in a dark room full of people pedaling bicycles going nowhere. It’s gongs and oms and whale songs soothing in the dim inner sancta of spas. It’s a Norteño song bouncing out of a passing El Camino and schoolkids singing o beautiful for spacious skies in a classroom with the windows open and the rasp of a beat from somebody’s earbuds you pass on the sidewalk. It’s pit bulls barking through chain-link and Chihuahuas yapping behind screen doors and poodles snoozing on terra-cotta tiles. It’s blenders and grinders and juicers and hissing steel espresso machines the size of submarines and waiters who talk too much—Any special plans for the weekend? Do anything special over the weekend?—and water, so precious, splashing into fountains and pools and hot tubs and tall glasses on shaded patios, burbling from hoses and geysering from broken pipes. And underneath, there’s the hum of traffic, always there, like the ocean that lives in seashells, like the cosmic whoosh of the expanding universe. At least that’s what I tried to tell him. I don’t know what I actually said. -Page 264

L.A. is dust and exhaust and the hot, dry wind that sets your nerves on edge and pushes fire up the hillsides in ragged lines like tears in the paper that separates us from hell, and it’s towering clouds of smoke, and it’s sunshine that won’t let up and cool ocean fog that gets unrolled at night over the whole basin like a clean white hospital sheet and peeled back again in the morning. It’s a crescent moon in a sky bruised green after the sunset has beaten the shit out of it. It’s a lazy hammock moon rising over power lines, over the skeletal silhouettes of pylons, over shaggy cypress trees and the spiky black lionfish shapes of palm-tree crowns on too-skinny trunks. It’s the Big One that’s coming to turn the city to rubble and set the rubble on fire but not today, hopefully not today. It’s the obviousness of pointing out that the freeway looks like a ruby bracelet stretched alongside a diamond one, looks like a river of lava flowing counter to a river of champagne bubbles. People talk about the sprawl, and, yeah, the city is a drunk, laughing bitch sprawled across the flats in a spangled dress, legs kicked up the canyons, skirt spread over the hills, and she’s shimmering, vibrating, ticklish with light. Don’t buy a star map. Don’t go driving around gawking because you’re already there, man. You’re in it. It’s all one big map of the stars. At least that’s what I heard him saying. -Page 265

L.A. is mysterious crumbling old hilltop piles, and it’s haciendas wrapped in bougainvillea and Craftsman bungalows neat as a pin and little flat-roofed adobe things with bars on the windows, and it’s surf shacks and drug shacks and grumpy-old-man-no-solicitors shacks and patchouli shacks strung with prayer flags, windows glowing red through printed Indian cotton as though inside is the beating heart of everything. It’s the tents of the homeless crowded under an overpass; it’s the spherical mud nests of swallows high up under an overpass; it’s vines hanging from an overpass like a beaded curtain. It’s trash blowing around in the hot, dry wind, nesting in ice plant by the freeway. It’s the teasing, skipping, arcing fan dance of lawn sprinklers. It’s the snip snip of pruning shears and the plunk of lemons falling from laden branches to split open and rot on the sidewalk under hovering bees, and it's the placid blue gliding pool net maneuvered by a gardener in a broad straw hat, graceful as a gondolier. -Page 265

She hadn’t anticipated how much of her behavior after marriage would be motivated by a wish not to argue. -Page 280

One thing I learned is that you don’t just love a person, you love a vision of your life with them. And then you have to mourn both. -Page 280

Mother Macqueen had graduated with an esoteric set of beliefs, partly of her own concoction, that Barclay said had both enchanted and deranged his father: She perceived life as a continuous storm of divine wrath and celestial mercy, human beings blown one way and then the other by competing gusts on which angels and devils flew like bats. -Page 284

There should be an Antiques Roadshow for memories, and I would sit behind a desk and explain that while your memory might be lovely and have tremendous sentimental value, it was worth nothing to anyone but you. -Page 340

In his sixties, he dedicates himself to advocating for endangered species and indigenous people. He is obsessed with the threat of nuclear war. He’d helped to shrink the world but wishes it had not shrunk. -Page 357

I’ve always needed to feel I had a purpose, and now I have an undeniable one. Is this why people have wars? To give themselves something to do? To feel a part of something? -Page 477

The landscape was huge and beautiful in the way the concept of death is huge and beautiful—its beauty doesn’t really apply to you. -Page 493

You push on men and eventually you get to the bedrock of it all, which is that they think they’re better than us. And they’re the ones who made this war. I’ve been thinking about that. We get angry and nothing happens. Men get angry, and the whole world burns up. -Page 495

Distance equals speed multiplied by time. Time equals distance divided by speed. He feels the lines of latitude sliding underneath like the rungs of a ladder, watches the whitecaps through the drift meter, measuring the difference between where they are going and where they mean to go. That’s where life is, that wedge of discrepancy. -Page 525

I cried because Marian Graves hadn’t drowned and, to one person, hadn’t been lost. I cried because of Joey’s kindness, because I was jealous of Kalani having a childhood, because I was the kind of asshole who could be jealous of a little kid whose parents couldn’t take care of her. I cried for Mitch and for my parents. I cried because I’d gotten going and sometimes you just have to ride out the tears. -Page 576