Katabasis

This was the key to flourishing in graduate school. You could do anything if you were delusional.

How wonderful, truly, to have a friend whose silence you adored.

And if falling in love was discovery, was letting yourself be discovered the equivalent to being loved?

She gazed at Peter and thought, 'I wish I were the night, so that I might watch your sleep with a thousand eyes.

Surely no one else lived like this - burdened by the tiniest details they assumed had enormous consequences. Surely no one else was so anchored by anxiety. Other people could stumble and shake their heads and move on. How she envied their lightness.

Christ,” said Peter. “Hell is a campus.

Those who had nothing substantial to brag about bragged the loudest.

Her memory did that sometimes; she confused memories and reality, her imagination was too vivid, she couldn’t help it.

Fortunately graduate school had prepared her for this, the constant managing of despair.

What Alice needed most then was a nice long holiday, and then perhaps institutionalization at some remote facility near the sea.

Hell’s lonely,” said Peter. “You’ll want company.” “Hell is other people, I’ve heard.

I feel sometimes it is so difficult to be conscious.

Now all that was gone. This was the unbelievable fact of death. This was a paradox her mind could not accept, that someone could be in the world one moment and simply be gone the next.

What you must realize, Alice, is that you cannot just take refuge in feminism when it suits you.

But of course it was worth it. It was the only thing that was worth it. She had been fortunate to find a vocation that made irrelevant everything else, and anything that made you forget to eat, drink, sleep, or maintain basic relationships—anything that made you so inhumanly excited—had to be pursued with single-minded devotion.

And so perhaps it was entirely possible - common, even - for you to look into the eyes of someone you'd been falling in love with, someone you had spent every waking moment with, whose breathing sounded as familiar as your own - and fail to recognize them at all.

Sometimes I am very clever but most of the time I am not. I have been a good person sometimes, and a bad person at others. Sooner or later I will die. But before I do, I will try—I will try very hard—to make it count.

Perhaps human intelligence was a mistake, and everyone who celebrated the escape from the Garden of Eden was wrong. Perhaps the gift of rationality did not outweigh the debilitating agony that came with it.

Being an idiot!” All four Shades shuddered; a quivering mass of jelly. “Oh, the horror! Oh, to not be clever!” And one of them wailed, “What if you never learn to read!

Everyone knew that the nicer a library was, the better the work you did within it.

You might say karma is like a seed. Seeds grow into fruit. Karma is a natural consequence. Badness accrues. It affects the way you live your life, how you perceive the world. When you do evil things, you see the world as petty and selfish and cruel. And what you experience in Hell is just the final ripple effect of your original evil. You get precisely what you asked for. And I think the whole point of Hell is to show you the full extent of what you wanted.

The world is not a complete system; there is always an exception. No explanation for its existence; no reason why one might expect it to have existed before or to ever exist again. The world was simply unknowable; exceptions cropped up all the time, and all you had to do to beat the odds was just look.

She was not alone. She was safe. There was at least a single other soul in this universe who vibrated at her same frequency.

You’ve got that look about you.” “What look?” “Well, not to be rude, but you’re all fucked up, aren’t you?

Good jobs were vanishingly rare in academia. Alice very much wanted one. She wouldn't know what to do with herself otherwise. She had trained her entire life to do this one thing, and if she could not do it, then she had no reason to live.

Believe the lie - trust the lie - it is the only thing you have. Stay in the cage and paint the walls. If you do not, then you must quit; but if you can delude yourself long enough, then your delusions might very well come true.

She thought she’d learned to inhabit the impossible ideal: the girl who was eminently fuckable but unreachable, and therefore virtuous and perfect. The girl who was everything all at once.

You thought people were giants, and they disappointed you by being so human.

She was of course underpaid and overworked, but this condition was common among graduate students and no one cared much about it.