(Had Vincent succeeded? She felt by any rational measure she was living an extraordinary life, but on the other hand she wasn’t sure what the goal had been. later she stood alone on the terrace, filming the Mediterranean, and thought, Maybe this could be enough. Maybe not everyone needs to have a specific ambition. ic ould be the sort of person who just goes to beautiful places and owns beautiful things. Maybe I could film five-minute videos of every sea and every ocean and perhaps there would be some meaning in that project, some kind of completion.)
It wasn’t the romance of the century, but it didn’t have to be; if you genuinely enjoy someone’s company, she’d been thinking lately, if you enjoy your life with them and don’t mind sleeping with them, isn’t that enough? Do you have to actually be in love for a relationship to be real, whatever real means, so long as there’s respect and something like a friendship?
Anyway, it wasn’t just that. I was having one of those moments, where you look at your life and think, Is this really it? I thought there’d be more.
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.
her values included a determination that no one should ever be able to tell whether she cared about any given thing or not.
Beauty can have a corrosive effect on character. It is possible to coast for some years on mo more than a few polished lines and a dazzling smile, and those years are formative.
You know, if you don’t have to be alone, then maybe you shouldn’t be.
“Was she depressed?”
“Bro, it’s prison. Everyone’s depressed.”
There is exquisite lightness in waking each morning with the knowledge that the worst has already happened.
the wasteful acres of carpeting and empty space. Luxury is a weakness.
Everyone thinks they’re the exception.
she had slipped into dependency because dependency was easier.
It was like being in a play where no one knew the next line.
But that’s where people get tripped up with their excuses. They get nervous and throw in all these excessive details, and that’s how you know they’re lying.
If he were a better person, he thought, he’d be happy for them instead of resentful.
trapped in a meeting that had outlived its natural lifespan but refused to die.
One of our signature flaws as a species: we will risk almost anything to avoid looking stupid.
It’s possible to both know and not know something.
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.
high with the twin pleasures of action and secrecy
that increasingly vast category of things that we doable when he was eighteen but less so as he slid into middle age.
It turned out that never having that conversation with Vincent meant that he was somehow condemned to always have that conversation with Vincent.