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

the place fizzed with a particular and constant hostility, the kind of hissing acrimony that naturally arises whenever a group of highly competitive people who are all evenly matched are housed in the same small space with the understanding that only some of them would have the opportunity to distinguish themselves.

as if someone had reached in and grabbed his spine like a snake and was trying to loose it from its bundles of nerves by shaking it

At such times, he envied his friends for the exact things he had once pitied them for: the fact that no one had any expectations for them, the ordinariness of their families (or their very lack of them), the way they navigated their lives by only their own ambitions.

while the others created, he copied:

Somewhere, surrendering to what seemed to be your fate had changed from being dignified to being a sign of your own cowardice.

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.

which he finally finished with the unhappy certainty that he had gotten all of it wrong.

he was the dumbest person in their class, admitted as a sort of unofficial poor-white-rural-dweller-oddity affirmative-action representative.)

for how obscure and merely decorative what he did know seemed to be.