A Little Life: The Million-Copy Bestseller (Picador Collection)

while the others created, he copied:

When did pursuing your ambitions cross the line from brave into foolhardy?

the house smelled of butter and pepper and starch: pasta, he thought.

He was missing, it seemed, the sense of victimization and woundedness and perpetual anger it took to be black,

he would be left alone to scan the arts section of the paper, and read about other people who were doing the kinds of things he didn’t even have the expansiveness, the arrogance of imagination to dream of, and in those hours the world would feel very large, and the lake very empty, and the night very black, and he would wish he were back in Wyoming

Acting was like war, and they were veterans: they didn’t want to think about the war, and they certainly didn’t want to talk about it with naïfs who were still eagerly dashing toward the trenches,

Much of his friendship with Jude, it often seemed, was not letting himself ask the questions he knew he ought to, because he was afraid of the answers.

Was it when you got fat, or bald, or got bad plastic surgery that couldn’t disguise the fact that you were fat and bald?

When he worked on this painting, he felt sometimes as if he were flying, as if the world of galleries and parties and other artists and ambitions had shrunk to a pinpoint beneath him, something so small he could kick it away from himself like a soccer ball, watch it spin off into some distant orbit that had nothing to do with him.

its trees so deeply green they looked blue,