My desire was for Julian’s feelings to be stronger than mine. No one would sympathize with that. I wanted a power imbalance, and I wanted it to benefit me.

We wondered about the straights. “They’re like pandas,” Edith said. “You pity them in the zoo, but fling the cage open and they’ll stay there, chewing.”

He receivedly pronunciated his defalcatory fricatives and he took his time doing it, because he could,

ironic heteronormativity was still heteronormative,

For Brits, class was like humility: you only had it as long as you denied it.

she asked if I thought I’d gone for unavailable people because I knew I’d never have to face the reality that being with them would not solve all my problems. I told her she had no business saying something that perceptive.

If your work was an intransitive verb then that meant your trust fund subsidized it.

“Why do you want to be busy?” “It’s a status symbol. It’s like, ‘I’m so in-demand in the skilled economy.’”

I felt like abandoning everything else I did to try to be happy, and just spending the rest of my life finding things Edith needed to be told, and telling her.