Entitlement

by Rumaan Alam

So often, she thought herself strange, or different, or apart. She was too young to understand that how she felt was simply how most people felt, at least on occasion, when they were being most honest with themselves.

I wouldn’t discount the importance of other people. The thing that makes life interesting is that it ends. The thing that makes love worthwhile is that it’s all we’ve got.”

How could a person stand it? How could a person live knowing that anything could happen to them, or how could a person assure that nothing ever would?

We wish that, of the people we truly love, to see them as they were before we knew them.

The cost of things makes no sense. Value is determined by rooms full of guys trading things. It’s abstract.