Persephone (Into Shadow, #2)

by Lev Grossman

Up until then he’d been a pretty good dad. Like me, he liked poetry. Unlike me, he always believed in me. He always told me I was special, that I had a gift, and I just had to wait till I grew up to find out what it was.

took all that stuff and put it in what I thought of as a mental disposal facility. I could picture it quite vividly: it was gray and metal and industrial looking, roughly riveted together, with the words CONTENTS UNDER PRESSURE stenciled on it in red. It was a toxic emotional waste storage site. Its capacity was infinite.

I just wanted to be somebody else, I didn’t care who. Sometimes I felt like I couldn’t breathe, like I was drowning in myself.

Even this, even this I could not have. But of course I couldn’t. I couldn’t believe I’d been so stupid. I couldn’t believe I’d thought I could pass for an actual person.

But this was often my response to situations of extreme stressfulness: I just curled up and shut down. Like Lindsay would say, it’s a basic human survival skill.