The Nix: A novel

She knew that way down deep she was a phony, just your average normal girl.

maybe this is the most important lesson the school could teach them about the American workplace: how to sit calmly at your desk and surf the internet and not go insane.

In his mind he was the protagonist of every story, the center of everyone’s appalling attention;

The flip side of being a person who never fails at anything is that you never do anything you could fail at. You never do anything risky.

Every life has a moment like this, a trauma that breaks you into brand-new pieces.

neurobiological traps, that the more he played Elfscape the more his brain was unable to compute any but the most short-term and proximate goals, which happened to be the goals of Elfscape itself—the

smelled the aggressive, claustrophobic odor of institutionalized medicine:

So instead he will do this: He will clarify it, illuminate it, try to understand it better. He can prevent his past from swallowing his present. So he’s trying to be in the moment, trying not to let the moment get all discolored by his fantasies of what the moment ought to be.

Seeing ourselves clearly is the project of a lifetime.