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

friendship was a series of exchanges: of affections, of time, sometimes of money, always of information.

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

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

the pressure to achieve happiness felt almost oppressive,

There, art was something that was just an accessory to a lifestyle. You painted or sculpted or made crappy installation pieces because it justified a wardrobe of washed-soft T-shirts and dirty jeans and a diet of ironic cheap American beers and ironic expensive hand-rolled American cigarettes. Here, however, you made art because it was the only thi

that brief moment of possessing both downtown credibility and the promise of more mainstream success.

father and a mother, presumably. Or, more realistically, simply a man and a woman.

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.

But what was happiness but an extravagance, an impossible state to maintain, partly because it was so difficult to articulate? He couldn’t remember being a child and being able to define happiness: there was only misery, or fear, and the absence of misery or fear, and the latter state was all he had needed or wanted. “I think he’s shy,” he finished

verse meant to agitate no one, anger and beauty reduced to empty aphorisms.