Katabasis

by R.F. Kuang

“Hell’s lonely,” said Peter. “You’ll want company.” “Hell is other people, I’ve heard.”

Favoritism was well and fine if she was the favorite.

Fortunately graduate school had prepared her for this, the constant managing of despair.

Wickedness felt better when you had a coconspirator; otherwise it was just you and your conscience.

for all academic parents hope and expect to have smart children but don’t dare admit out loud that they want genius children.

All this time, thought Alice. All this time they’d both been drowning, and thinking the other was gloating at them from the shore.

For a moment she found this prospect terrifying—that memory was not a well-kept library, but rather a moth-eaten basement with dim, flickering lights—but remembered then that this was just how everyone lived all the time;

What a miracle a person was, she thought. They took up so little space. The difference between presence and absence was not even a square meter of matter.