“Everything is broken and messed up and completely fine. That is what life is. It’s only the ratios that change. Usually on their own. As soon as you think that’s it, it’s going to be like this forever, they change again.”

“But I’m sure at the end of our lives we will all be thinking, if only I’d consumed more content.”

“Nostos, Martha, returning home. Algos, pain. Nostalgia is the suffering caused by our unappeased yearning to return.” Whether or not, he said, the home we long for ever existed.

feel like my entire life has been subsumed by your sadness.

It was not enough to be extraordinary to the three of us.

“That I’m not good at being a person. I seem to find it more difficult to be alive than other people.”

“First novels are autobiography and wish fulfillment. Evidently, one’s got to push all one’s disappointments and unmet desires through the pipes before one can write anything useful.” I

“I am not being whimsical, Martha. Short another, beauty is a reason to live.”

don’t know,” she said. “Just by focusing on—or doing practical things and pretending to enjoy them until I sort of do enjoy them or can’t remember what I enjoyed before.”