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He wanted to be asked to write for the New York Times Book Review but didn’t want to actually write anything.
what would stand between you and death at the hands of nature but beautiful youth,
Maybe no one, however much in love, cares about the minutiae of someone else’s life.
She was young and didn’t understand that was how everyone saw themselves, as the main character of a story, rather than one of literal billions,
The world operated according to logic, but the logic had been evolving for some time, and now they had to reckon with that. Whatever they thought they’d understood was not wrong but irrelevant.
He missed the presence of other humans, and he was putting on a brave front because that was his job as a man.
Fear was private. It was primal. It was something you guarded because you thought you could defuse it that way.
Books ruined everyone—wasn’t that what his academic work was meant to show?
What if Rose, right then, was wandering on the side of the road, and sought help from some passing motorist?
Terrible things happened constantly and never prevented you from going out for ice cream or celebrating birthdays or going to the movies or paying your taxes or fucking your wife
You demanded answers, but the universe refused.
Kids were merely too young to know to look away from the inexplicable. Kids stared at the raving schizophrenic on the subway while adults cast eyes down and thought about podcasts.
a mother in St. Charles, Maryland, drowned her two daughters in the bathtub, which struck her as far more sensible than a round of Chutes and Ladders. That game required neither skill nor strategy; all it had to teach was that life was mostly unearned advantage or devastating fall.
They were bad men, they told themselves, not knowing how little it mattered whether you’d spent your life being good or bad.
