The stress of this fraud makes her want to escape from reality, which prompts her to smoke marijuana, which makes her eat compulsively, which forces her to exercise obsessively and without reward, which makes her original dishonesty so shameful. But I am the only one who knows this. Only I see her secrets.

In general, brilliant people study complex things in order to make life simpler for the average and the less-than-average and the infirm.

This is why movies have less value than we like to pretend—movies can’t show reality, because honest depictions of reality offend intelligent people.

too. What I do is much closer to illusion. I relate to people like David Blaine: We both do something visually confounding that demands physical endurance. The only difference is that I’m doing something essential. Magicians only want to get laid.”

We always end up being ourselves, somehow. I was who I was long before I consciously became the person I am. Being unseen makes me feel different than other people, but I’ve always felt different than other people. Invisibility isn’t the issue. The difference is that I’ve always possessed the single-minded dedication to make an impossible scenario

You enter therapy in order to confront four-word sentences: Why am I here? Where am I going? What does it mean?

Do they feel some kind of social pressure to prove they’re not self-absorbed, even though the basis of this entire process is a critical examination of one’s own self-absorption?

Because humans live finite lives, all technological advances immediately feel banal to whatever generation inherits their benefits. Any advance can be appreciated only by the handful of people who happen to exist within the same time period of that specific technology’s introduction. You follow my meaning? Those are the only people who notice the

There’s a few lines where the singer mentions how the Beatles’ career is like a fairy tale, and that the trajectory of their fame and their impact on the world would seem completely implausible if it were presented in a fictional context. That was the part that made Valerie smile the most—the not-so-obvious idea that the Beatles were not imaginary.