Trust

by Hernan Diaz

Often confused with shyness or arrogance, her silence was now, she could tell, taken to be the becoming attitude for someone of her standing, and her ill-concealed ennui was all of a sudden welcomed as sophisticated detachment—it would have been vulgar for someone like her to show an interest in anything. Everyone expected and even wanted her to be intimidating.

She was particularly interested in living authors, although she initially refused to meet them, knowing the distance between the work and the person could be covered only by disappointment.

She knew that looking away from the destitute families, the breadlines, the shuttered stores, and the despair in every thinning face was a gross form of self-indulgence, but she also understood that the anguish she felt when confronted by this bleak reality was yet another of her luxuries.

This, she told herself, was the beginning of madness. The mind becoming the flesh for its own teeth.

Generosity is the mother of ingratitude.

people forget an all-important distinction: that my needs, desires and cravings may mirror yours does not mean we have a shared goal. It merely means we have the same goal.

“His cause is his one luxury. And from his self-denial comes his self-importance.”

There was a bizarre sort of violence in having my memories plagiarized.

God is the most uninteresting answer to the most interesting questions.