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“Because that’s not how life works. There are some things you just have to accept.”
“Well I won’t. I won’t accept anything. If I will it, then it will be so. I will make it so. It’s not fair that some people get everything and other people nothing,” he adds.

“How is life fair if we can’t be as we want? If we try hard enough?”

He does not want to be troubled by asking questions of the universe and existence. Above all else, he wants to be left alone.

He is insufficient to the burden of living his own life, let alone one worthy of the lives his parents have sacrificed for him.

To him it is simple: everyone has a true life, a true self, they are destined to fulfill.

In this way, this other boy is his impossible self. He awakens something in him with the relentless strike of piano keys. He would like to be this boy. Or to have something of his. If he could be someone else, then he would be this boy. This is the boy he is meant to be.

How is it he is sufficient to himself?

As far as he can see, the point of being an adult is that you no longer have to do things you don’t want to do. That is the only good thing about it.

He hopes only some animals cannot see colors. But above all he wants to know what color things truly are. He worries. He does not know what the teacher means by green; it may mean something different when he sees it to when his mother sees it. What if green for him is blue for his mother? What if no one sees the same thing? What then? And why does no one care?

His father asks what he will use them for, to which he replies, “Stories.” He does not have any stories to tell, he cannot think of any, but he likes the idea of filling the pages, writing a book of his own, like the ones he reads in the evenings at home. He would like to write a story that carries all the way to the end.

..his fear of being bad is greater even than his sense of his own importance.

Magic was a choice, and it must be created.

Isn't it strange? I'm so much older now, but I still remember the way it was to know the ache inside me even before I was wise enough to be able to name it. The child within craving that comfort and realized that I could give him precisely what he needed,

But I am coming to identity that feeling of embarrassment as something akin to tenderness. Because in witnessing someone’s being touched we are also witnessing someone’s being moved, the absence of which in ourselves is a sorrow and a sacrifice. In witnessing the absence of movement in ourselves by witnessing its abundance in another…can hurt, until it becomes, if we are lucky, an opening.

Goddamn! How often do you get to see someone slow dancing with a pigeon?

The cliché is that everyone young is filled with fire and brio and not much sense, and I understand the risks of generalization, the nuances that exist from person to person, but by and large—in my experience, that is—I’ve found it to be true. Young people can be geniuses, but they’re often just very silly.

The majority of life experiences that might happen to us have yet to happen. We’re so bereft of real perspective, everything feels so immediate and consequential, when in reality the bulk of it will average out to nothing. Nothing at all.

He could be a symbol next to all the other symbols, a stand-in for something greater and deeper about the way life worked. It mattered how he’d seen himself, but it also mattered how other people had seen him, too, and what he’d meant to them. And maybe we could even fold in the theory about his suicide in order to spark a larger conversation about, I don’t know, suicide.

Life was about surviving, until you could make sense of it. Sometimes you didn’t even make sense of it. You just kept going until you were dead too.

“You know, work sucks. You do it or you don’t, until you die.”

But you know how people are at that age—they don’t want to believe that anything less than what they want is possible.”

“I don’t regret anything,” Olivia said, “and I don’t know if I can put this into words. It’s more like thinking about the decisions you made, and how they swung your life down whatever road. The small moments that end up deciding the larger moments.

It was just what you did—latch on to some unexamined dimension of your personal life and share it with everyone. We tell ourselves stories in order to live, Joan Didion had written, but the fact that she hadn’t meant it positively had been lost in translation, especially in an era with reputations to build and raises to earn.

the loss I’ve experienced is a different kind—not the absence of an entire person, but the diminishing of potential.

I tried to concentrate on mingling, cycling through the dialogue I’d repeated several times since arriving in town—my life was going like this, New York was going like that, I’d done such and such and was looking forward to doing such and such more, the tone of my voice pitching toward something I recognized as false cheer, as though I were auditioning to sing Christmas carols.

We’ll look handsome and beautiful, we’ll make the right references and wear the right clothes, we’ll kiss a stranger and feel satisfied with our decisions whenever we collapse into bed.

Hamilton had always been “handsome for a music writer,” but in Los Angeles the last traces of boyishness had been excised and now he was just good-looking.

He lived only in the past, and I lived only in the present.

The advancing years had repealed most of her teenage intensity:

We weren’t going to be best friends the next day, and this wasn’t some burning issue we needed to resolve in order to move on to a new phase of our lives. It was just the kind of thing that came up when you had history with someone, history you’d never considered because it didn’t matter that much, until suddenly it did.