Less Is Lost (Arthur Less #2)

by Andrew Sean Greer

But, like the Swiss, it was neutral; it did not love him back.

I understood that happiness is within our grasp if we reach for it.

But it is a rule of life, alas, that nobody is kidding.

Marian looks still lively but despairing, like a plant that has been torn up at the roots; there is no help for what she is suffering, and her eyes keep going to the window as if it opens onto another plane on which none of this has happened.

So hunched over he seems to stare only at his shuffling feet, seeing nothing of the path ahead, as perhaps we all must.

He thinks each day will be better than the next; he is wrong. He awakens the next morning and thinks it again; he is wrong. He thinks we are free to become our true selves, that we are free to love as we choose.

“Welcome to the middle part of life, Freddy. I warn you: you won’t like the last part.”

Go get lost somewhere, it always does you good. But not yet. Don’t leave me just yet.”

How wonderful to believe in a universe that holds, for you, a special plan!

Well, my darling, the world is so constructed that men like you will always end up safe.

The gold has gone from his eyes, perhaps panned out at last.

For are we not that fraction of old magic that remains?

But reader, there are no coincidences on this journey; there are only the signs we refuse to recognize…

He thought he was the only one for whom ordering a deli sandwich and wrestling an alligator held equal levels of terror. It is one of the reasons I always think of him as the bravest man I know—for who can guess what feats of valor he has overcome simply to arrive at your door?

Why did no one tell me life could be this? As if they had been hiding from him that, instead of Puritan hard work and failed get-rich schemes, promises broken and pointless battles waged, life could be sequins and song. He felt he had been lied to from the Pilgrims on down. The secret had been kept from him like a mad aunt locked in the basement, and now a neighbor had innocently set her loose—and she was wonderful! He understood everyone was wrong about life, and if they were wrong about that, then they could be wrong about him.