The Candy House: A Novel

I understood with sudden clarity that doing the right thing—being right—gets you nothing in this world. It’s the sinners everyone loves: the flailers, the scramblers, the bumblers. There was nothing sexy about getting it right the first time.

But I hadn’t counted on the circularity of life: the way it delivers us, with age, back to the beginning.

How can the architecture contain all those lives? Why doesn’t it explode from the pressure?

a symbiosis that made her old life obsolete, had been temporary.

Anyway, my point is that quantification, per se, doesn’t ruin baseball. In fact, it deepens our understanding of it. So why are we so averse to letting ourselves be quantified?”

The defector is a typical—likely an impressionist—beguiled by a fantasy of freedom and escape. It is a state of mind I can grasp only theoretically. There is nothing original about human behavior.

She had always been observant, but now her watchfulness was exaggerated to the point of aberration, like a distended limb.

And yet these many irreconcilable worlds occupy one physical space—like the D&D maps stacked inside a single envelope. How is it possible? Philosophy!

Roxy marvels at the deep absorption of the players, who never seem impatient. It’s as if the rest of life has slowed to match the pace of the game.