My Favorite Terrible Thing

by Madeleine Henry

I’ve learned by now that bright charisma is usually a warning sign. The most mesmerizing people tend to be the most deceptive.

“She was an adult as a child, and a child as an adult.”

the legendary Ernest Shackleton ad, “Men wanted for hazardous journey. Low wages, bitter cold, long hours of complete darkness. Safe return doubtful.”

“Sometimes, it felt like she wasn’t even writing. She was building. It wasn’t creative. It was architectural.

The angel explains that she and her soulmate have been reincarnating for thousands of years, and the goal of their time on this planet has been to evolve into old souls. They’re supposed to grow spiritually—meaning, to lose interest in this world and become unreasonably kind.

I knew the odds of me passing statistics, I’d be passing statistics.

In my experience, goal-oriented types are the most prone to miss something obvious. Because they only see one thing at a time. They focus on their current project. The rest can slip past them.

‘Florida’s where people make a fire to escape the heat.’”

Apparently, there’s an equivalent term for “bookworm” in a dozen languages, which Claire happened to know. In Indonesian, it’s “book flea”; in Chinese, “book insect”; and in Korean, “book bug.”

“Claire couldn’t think with any noise,” she explains. “If we were in the library, and someone started to talk, I could see it on her face. It looked like a city was collapsing in her mind.

plenty of writers need silence to do their best work. Plenty go so far as to show signs of misophonia—extreme discomfort with noise—including Proust, Anton Chekhov, and Franz Kafka. It makes sense, if they’re trying to listen inward, hear faint words inside them. If I had a musical inner voice, I wouldn’t want it steamrolled by chewing or car horns either.

“Books are like horoscopes. Don’t you know that by now? Everyone sees what they want to see—

You have what every great villain needs, don’t you? A demented moral compass. You can convince yourself that you’re doing good, even when you’re killing.”

“Don’t fall for your own tricks.” “What does that mean?” “It means . . . don’t be the thief who gets robbed.”