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1 " I don't even like most people. "
― , Early Work
2 " I don't care about my life. "
3 " What do you actually care about?""People," I said."All right, E.M. Forster. "
4 " What I want and what's possible aren't necessarily compatible. "
5 " Julia's defining quality, maybe, was her combination of outer normality, even placidity, and a roiling, crazily volatile inner life that expressed itself mainly in her writing. "
6 " What happens at the end of a story? Something changes, or it doesn't. I like it best when things just stop. "
7 " But, like lots of people she knew, she mostly wanted it so she wouldn't have to want it anymore, so that people would get off her back about how she didn't have any. "
8 " I just want her to be happy. But I don't think that's what she wants. "
9 " It's just really hard when you've got something, and you think something is going to happen next, and then it's taken away from you. It's one thing when you don't know what you're losing, but to have it, and understand how precious it is, and still lose it . . . It fucking sucks. "
10 " I wanted my unhappiness to be a result of defying convention—like a Hardy novel where I'd exceeded my society's allowance for freethinking and was now being punished. "
11 " It had occurred to me lately that it was much more possible than I'd previously considered to be both 'self-aware' and fundamentally wrong about the nature of the self. "
12 " Our lives aren't worth dying over. "
13 " I put the story aside and added it to the growing list of things I was inadequate at or incapable of doing. "
14 " It was like, oh, we've found the still, dead center of things. This is the quiet middle place where nothing can be done. "
15 " But it was true that I preferred to do nothing. "
16 " My hope, as always, was that someone else would make the decision for me, absolve me of the little responsibility I had. "
17 " She was nauseous with anticipation . . . even as she knew that, even on TV, these kinds of things never seemed to actually work out. "
18 " She'd been surprised by the pang that the idea of the place gave her. She didn't think of herself as a romantic about location, even though she was secretly romantic about everything. "
19 " How can I make your difficult life more tolerable?""Just be nice to me, I guess? My brain doesn't work. "
20 " But won't you miss me?" . . . "I already do," he said. "
