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, you learn not to bite hard.

— Christopher Bollen

All your convictions come back to mock you when you reach a certain age.

— Christopher Bollen

Everyone loves a dead artist. It’s the living ones that people can’t tolerate.

— 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 he never had to do when he imagined straight couples having sex.

— 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 the subject: those future babies would be its next generation of users.

— Christopher Bollen

I’m not some outdated alarm company, like Mildew Security, singular. I’m offering a whole new variety of services, plural—water testing, soil graphs, toxic air readings, the security of this century. The security that you aren’t being poisoned in your own home.

— Christopher Bollen

I’ve always looked like this—in between. Is there ever an age when a person looks exactly like themselves?

— Christopher Bollen

Maybe, in the end, a home is a place where you have no other choice but to stay.

— Christopher Bollen

Mills was experienced enough to understand what gay men were often forced to be in this world: romantic opportunists.

— 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 to get that sensation.

— Christopher Bollen