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‘I miss her so much,’ I said, over and over again, as my aunt ran her hands consolingly over my back.
A difficult childhood is like an invisible enemy, I thought. You never know when it will strike.
‘would it really be better if this world didn’t exist at all? Instead, we live, make art, love, observe, suffer, laugh and are happy. We all exist in a million different ways so that there is no void, and the price we pay for that is death.’
Look at you, I thought: why do you so often long for solitude in company when you can scarcely bear to be alone any more?
‘Yes, but the antidote to loneliness isn’t just being around random people indiscriminately, the antidote to loneliness is
emotional security.’
You alone are responsible for yourself and your life. And if you just do what you’ve always done, you’ll just get what you’ve always got.’
‘The question is, what wouldn’t be different? What would be the immutable part of you? The bit that would stay the same in every life, no matter what course it took. Are there elements in us that survive everything?’
the self must be broken in order to become itself.’
‘To find your true self you need to question everything you encountered at birth. And lose some of it, too, because often it’s only in pain that we discover what really belongs to us … It’s in the breaches that we recognize ourselves.’
Life is not a zero-sum game. It owes us nothing, and things just happen the way they do. Sometimes they’re fair and everything makes sense; sometimes they’re so unfair we question everything. I pulled the mask off the face of Fate, and all I found beneath it was chance.
