And so who would be his partner, who would make his unit? No one, it often seemed. They had abandoned him. And then, with each year, they abandoned him further. He had always known he would be the first among the four of them to be a success. This wasn’t arrogance: he just knew it. He worked harder than Malcolm, he was more ambitious than Willem.

He knew it was romantic, but he admired them: he admired anyone who could live for year after year on only their fast-burning hopes, even as they grew older and more obscure with every day. And, just as romantically, he thought of his time with the organization as his salute to his friends, all of whom were living the sorts of lives he marveled at:

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

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.