The Glass Hotel

There is exquisite lightness in waking each morning with the knowledge that the worst has already happened.

Memories are always bent retrospectively to fit individual narratives

One of our signature flaws as a species: we will risk almost anything to avoid looking stupid.

I'm no expert, but I remember reading somewhere, every time you retrieve a memory, that act of retrieval, it corrupts the memory a little bit. Maybe changes it a little.

What kept her in the kingdom was the previously unimaginable condition of not having to think about money, because that’s what money gives you: the freedom to stop thinking about money. If you’ve never been without, then you won’t understand the profundity of this, how absolutely this changes your life.

Give me quiet, he thought, give me forests and ocean and no roads. Give me the walk to the village through the woods in summer, give me the sound of wind in cedar branches, give me mist rising over the water, give me the view of green branches from my bathtub in the mornings. Give me a place with no people in it, because I will never fully trust another person again.

It’s possible to both know and not know something.’

She’d never believed in love at first sight but she did believe in recognition at first sight, she believed in understanding upon meeting someone for the first time that they were going to be important in her life, a sensation like recognizing a familiar face in an old photograph: in a sea of faces that mean nothing, one comes into focus. You.

A revelation earned only in hindsight: beauty can have a corrosive effect on character. It is possible to coast for some years on no more than a few polished lines and a dazzling smile, and those years are formative.

You know what I've learned about money? I was trying to figure out why my life felt more or less the same in Singapore as it did in London, and that's when I realized that money is its own country.

(Idea for a ghost story: a woman gets old and falls out of time and realizes that she’s become invisible.)

It is possible to leave so much out of any given story.

the problem with dropping out of the world is that the world moves on without you,

Imagining an alternate reality where there was no Iraq War, for example, or where the terrifying new swine flu in the Republic of Georgia hadn’t been swiftly contained; an alternate world where the Georgia flu blossomed into an unstoppable pandemic and civilization collapsed.

I've always had a weakness for places where it seems like time slows down.

Did I say I liked working with her? I loved working with her. I considered her a friend. You know how rare it is to work with someone who loves their life?

What does it mean to be a ghost, let alone to be there, or here? There are so many ways to haunt a person, or a life—

I don’t know, it just started to seem a little claustrophobic, living in the same place with the same people I’d known since I was born.

But does a person have to be either admirable or awful? Does life have to be so binary? Two things can be true at the same time, he told himself.

grief can make anyone a little irrational in the moment.

It's just one future slipping away and being replaced by another.

None of these scenarios seemed less real than the life she’d landed in, so much so that she was struck sometimes by a truly unsettling sense that there were other versions of her life being lived without her,

she believed in understanding upon meeting someone for the first time that they were going to be important in her life, a sensation like recognizing a familiar face in an old photograph: in a sea of faces that mean nothing, one comes into focus. You.

In their late thirties they'd decided not to have children, which at the time seemed like a sensible way to avoid unnecessary complications and heartbreak, and this decision had lent their lives a certain ease that he'd always appreciated, a sense of blissful unencumberance. But an encumbrance might also be thought of as an anchor, and what he'd found himself thinking lately was that he wouldn't mind being more anchored to this earth.

A memory, but it's a memory so vivid that there's a feeling of time travel, of visiting the actual moment.

she knew she was a reasonably intelligent person, but there’s a difference between being intelligent and knowing what to do with your life, also a difference between knowing that a college degree might change your life and a willingness to actually commit to the terrifying weight of student loans,

Anyway hallucinations is the wrong word, it’s more like a creeping sense of unreality, a sense of collapsing borders, reality seeping into the counterlife and the counterlife seeping into memory.

There’s such happiness in a successful escape.

Do you find yourself sort of secretly hoping that civilization collapses, Melissa said, just so that something will happen?