14
" Over time, I realized that the Bradleys may have liked me as an individual, but they loved me for what I represented. People who came from nothing, who busted their asses to get college scholarships, who hustled into a winning career. Look at me, climbing the ladder at KCN: I was a perfect example of that bootstrappy, self-reliant, equal-opportunity American spirit. (Never mind the various advantages I’d had: my skin color, my good health, my friendship with an heiress.) It allowed the Bradleys to sleep easy at night. To believe that the meritocracy functioned as it was supposed to. Their generosity was real, but Anne and Thomas took a calculated kind of pride in me, like I was proof of a successful charitable experiment... "
― Anna Pitoniak , Necessary People
20
" I wanted to succeed, to prove that I could do this. I wanted that more badly than I’d ever wanted anything. The world is shaped by powerful forces—politics, finance, media—from which most people live distantly, feeling the ripple effects but never understanding the origin. In the past year, I had finally crossed a crucial threshold. I was standing on the side of actor, not acted-upon. I sensed myself getting stronger, sharper, better. But I also sensed how desire fed on itself. It ballooned inside of me, until it squeezed out room for anything else. Sometimes I wondered whether it was deforming me.
But maybe that was backwards. Maybe you had to be deformed in the first place to be capable of such blistering want. Things weren’t getting pushed out. It was that there’d never been anything else in there. Just a void, waiting to be filled. "
― Anna Pitoniak , Necessary People
