That night I dreamt about the roses laid at the wrong feet—the feet of the nurse. Each bit of the dream was like a hyperlink. I pressed on one, wanting answers, and it took me to another. I could never get to the meaning at the bottom of the bits. When I reached for the petals of the roses, I was touching a metal seatbelt buckle in a coach, driving by night through a remote place, with a band of mist running parallel to the glass I least against.

— Olivia Sudjic

The glow of the streetlamps sat heavy and thick above me. As I walked aimlessly, in the direction of downtown, I returned to my theories. That Mizuki and I shared the pictorial equivalent of DNA. That a sympathetic magic existed between us, no matter how far apart we were pulled. That we defied physical laws of time and space, waves, gravity, the rules laid down by physicists which governed our physical universe (earthquakes, tsunamis) and physical bodies. And yet somehow our connection had led to the opposite of intimacy. My search had led to its opposite. I had never felt so isolated and disconnected, even from myself.

— Olivia Sudjic

The messages must be stuck somewhere in the tube of light underneath the ocean that connects London and New York.

— Olivia Sudjic

There was never one truth. Even the Higgs could still be used to prove opposing theories, its mass falling between them on a chart. Besides, I told myself, my breathing heavy, eyes widening until they bulged, I was post-truth.

— Olivia Sudjic

The sharp, superficial pain at being spoken to unkindly had obscured the deeper pain, which had not yet turned into something hard and heavy.

— Olivia Sudjic

The whole time I hadn't slept with anyone at university had made it harder and harder to finally do it. Like spending too long on a very high diving board, until finally you have to exit ignominiously, the same way you climbed up.

— Olivia Sudjic

Though I did not know her exact address, that she appeared to live almost within breathing distance of Robin, and that I lived with him, and that her pictures showed that she was now dating the mysterious Rupert Hunter, our despotic mothers, our absent fathers, the borders we had both crossed, all our many parallels and connections at every point, could not be chance. I saw it as evidence of the hidden connections between things, an all-powerful algorithm that sifted through chaos, singling out soulmates.

— Olivia Sudjic

To me, it was clear proof of the existence of supersymmetry, the idea that every particle has a partner. She was mine.

— Olivia Sudjic

Waking in the morning, I had to remember grief all over again. It was sunny, a white winter sun, and that made me sad.

— Olivia Sudjic

Was this what the city would look like when knowledge was no longer enough? When the desire to turn inward, surrendering entirely to one's own private world of nonresistance, overwhelmed, like creeping ivy, our desire to know worlds beyond it?

— Olivia Sudjic