The Nix

by Nathan Hill

Such were the spoils of love, he realized, that her success was also, by some odd refraction, his.

“Sometimes you take a wrong turn,” she said. “Sometimes you get lost.”

This is an opportunity. This is your chance to become a different person, a new and better person.”

“It’s like you’re going through training,” Bishop said. “Difficult training that will eventually make you stronger.”

“Everything is a game. And you have to decide whether you’re going to win or lose.”

Capitalism gobbles up non sequiturs happily.”

She had that naturalist’s lack of attention to outward appearances, an indifference toward things like cosmetics and grooming that read not as apathy but rather as transcendence.

Sometimes what we avoid most is not pain but mystery.

Because isn’t one reason men are moved to greatness partly the need to respond in a grand way to the people who cut them most deeply?

Because after you go through a trial by fire aren’t you supposed to come out a changed person?

The answer—and we’ve done a million studies on this—is because our lives are filled with tedium and drudgery and endless toil and we need a tiny blip of pleasure to repel the gathering darkness. Thus, we give ourselves a treat.

But Faye’s opinion is that sometimes a crisis is not really a crisis at all—just a new beginning. Because one thing she’s learned through all this is that if a new beginning is really new, it will feel like a crisis. Any real change should make you feel, at first, afraid. If you’re not afraid of it, then it’s not real change.