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"Walking along Fifth Avenue in Brooklyn, in his black overcoat and his gray interview suit, Quentin knew he wasn’t happy. Why not? He had painstakingly assembled all the ingredients of happiness. He had performed all the necessary rituals, spoken the words, lit the candles, made the sacrifices. But happiness, like a disobedient spirit, refused to come. He couldn’t think what else to do."
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"The real problem with being around James was that he was always the hero. And what did that make you? Either the sidekick or the villain."
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"He was absolutely prepared for this interview in every possible way. . . . but now that the ripened fruit of all that preparation was right in front of him he suddenly lost any desire for it."
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"He was used to this anticlimactic feeling, where by the time you’ve done all the work to get something you don’t even want it anymore."
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"But despite his odd appearance Eliot had an air of effortless self-possession that made Quentin urgently want to be his friend, or maybe just be him period. He was obviously one of those people who felt at home in the world—he was naturally buoyant, where Quentin felt like he had to dog-paddle constantly, exhaustingly, humiliatingly, just to get one sip of air."
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"And if you tell him you saw me smoking, I will banish you to the lowest circle of hell. Which I’ve never been there, but if even half of what I hear is true it’s almost as bad as Brooklyn.”
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"He was experimenting cautiously with the idea of being happy, dipping an uncertain toe into those intoxicatingly carbonated waters. It wasn’t something he’d had much practice at."
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"Out there he had been on the edge of serious depression, and worse, he had been in danger of learning to really dislike himself. He was on the verge of incurring the kind of inward damage you didn’t heal from, ever."
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"It occurred to him, long after it should have, that he wasn’t the only person here who had problems and felt like an outsider. Alice wasn’t just the competition, someone whose only purpose in life was to succeed and by doing so subtract from his happiness. She was a person with her own hopes and feelings and history and nightmares. In her own way she was as lost as he was."
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“Most people are blind to magic. They move through a blank and empty world. They’re bored with their lives, and there’s nothing they can do about it. They’re eaten alive by longing, and they’re dead before they die."
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"That guy was a mystery wrapped in an enigma and crudely stapled to a ticking fucking time bomb. He was either going to hit somebody or start a blog. To tell you the truth I’m kind of glad he hit you.”
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"He wasn’t in a safe little story where wrongs were automatically righted; he was still in the real world, where bad, bitter things happened for no reason, and people paid for things that weren’t their fault."
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"They were in the library in the Cottage, exhausted from having done nothing all day."
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"She couldn’t help it, it was just her neurotic need to control everything coming out to play, but that didn’t make it any less of a pain in the ass for the rest of them."
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“You have been studying magic the way a parrot studies Shakespeare. You recite it like you are saying the Pledge of Allegiance. But you do not understand it.”
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"Quentin had no intention of letting that happen to him, though it occurred to him that probably nobody actually set out to have that happen to them, and, statistically speaking, it had to happen to somebody."
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“It’s okay, Quentin. It was nice. The sex, I mean. You do realize it’s all right to have nice things sometimes, right?”
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"She has already seen more unhappiness, Quentin thought, than I will ever see in my life."
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"This was real, human sex, and it was so much better just because they weren’t animals—because they were civilized and prudish and self-conscious humans who transformed into sweaty, lustful, naked beasts, not through magic but because that’s who on some level they really were all along."
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"God, why is everybody else in the world but us so fucking stupid?”
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“The problem with growing up,” Quentin said, “is that once you’re grown up, people who aren’t grown up aren’t fun anymore.”
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“Do you promise to hate my parents as much as I do?”
“Oh, absolutely,” Quentin said. “Maybe even more.”
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"He wondered, theoretically, which of them had it worse. Alice’s parents were toxic monsters, but at least you could see it. His own parents were more like vampires or werewolves—they passed for human. He could rave about their atrocities all he wanted, he knew the villagers would never believe him till it was too late."
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"You don’t see it yet. There’s nothing out there. So you have to promise me, Quentin. Let’s never get like this, with these stupid hobbies nobody cares about. Just doing pointless things all day and hating each other and waiting to die.”
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It was like he’d been wending his way through a vast glittering city, zig-zagging through side streets and wandering through buildings and haunted de Chirico arcades and little hidden piazzas, the whole time thinking that he’d barely scratched the surface, that he was seeing just a tiny sliver of one little neighborhood. And then suddenly he turned a corner and it turned out he’d been through the whole city, it was all behind him, and all that was left was one short street leading straight out of town.
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"If there’s a single lesson that life teaches us, it’s that wishing doesn’t make it so. Words and thoughts don’t change anything. Language and reality are kept strictly apart—reality is tough, unyielding stuff, and it doesn’t care what you think or feel or say about it. Or it shouldn’t. You deal with it, and you get on with your life."
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"I got my heart’s desire, he thought, and there my troubles began."
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“We have our whole lives ahead of us and all I want to do is take a nap,”
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"He was not yet such a lush that he’d abandoned his snobbishness."
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"You sound just like my parents. That is just exactly what my ignorant Christian parents would say. Just, if it doesn’t fit with your theory, well, that’s just because, oh, it actually does, but God is mysterious, so we can’t see it. Because we’re so sinful. That’s so fucking easy.”
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"She always kept a cool head in difficult moments, maybe because she tended to be so out of control so much of the rest of the time."
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"The world had become smaller and somehow lighter—nothing meant anything, but what was meaning anyway but a burden that weighed them down?"
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"Daylight was here, and with it had come the world of appearances and lies and acting like everything was fine."
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"Who knows what other imaginary universes might turn out to be real? All of human literature could just be a user’s guide to the multiverse!"
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"This was what they’d been waiting for, too, without knowing it, he thought. The thing that was going to save them from the ennui and depression and meaningless busywork that had been stalking them ever since graduation, with its stale, alcoholic breath. It was finally here, and not a moment too soon. They couldn’t go on like this, and now they wouldn’t have to."
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"Seeing her there, so close and at the same time so infinitely removed, was like looking through a doorway into another universe, a warm, sunny, tropical dimension that he had once inhabited, but from which he was now banished."
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"He just stared at his lap and waited for each successive second to impose itself on him in turn like an uninvited guest the way the previous one had."
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"Anyway, the mood he was in, Quentin was willing to take any position on any subject with anybody if it meant he could pick a fight."
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"The danger would be going back, or staying still. The only way out was through. The past was ruins, but the present was still in play."
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"It was so much easier to be angry. Being angry made him feel strong, even though—and this contradiction did nothing to diminish his anger—he was angry only because his position was so weak."
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“Glory has its price,” Penny said. “Did you not know that, before you sought it?”
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"In a way fighting like this was just like using magic. You said the words, and they altered the universe. By merely speaking you could create damage and pain, cause tears to fall, drive people away, make yourself feel better, make your life worse."
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"He wanted to tell Alice he didn’t love her, but he couldn’t, because it wasn’t true. It was the one lie he couldn’t quite tell."
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"If you will, for just one second, look at your life and see how perfect it is. Stop looking for the next secret door that is going to lead you to your real life. Stop waiting. This is it: there’s nothing else. It’s here, and you’d better decide to enjoy it or you’re going to be miserable wherever you go, for the rest of your life, forever.”
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"The terror was so absolute, so all-encompassing, that it was almost like calm: not a suspicion but the absolute certainty that they were all about to die."
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"This woman had used him, used them all like toys. And if some of the toys got broken, oh well. That had been the real point of the whole story all along."
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"Now he had answers, but they weren’t doing what answers were supposed to do: they weren’t making things simpler or easier. They weren’t helping."
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"He could have eked out his sad wasted life with movies and books and masturbation and alcohol like everybody else. He would never have known the horror of really getting what he thought he wanted. He could have spared himself and everybody else the cost of it."
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"In different ways they had both discovered the same truth: that to live out childhood fantasies as a grown-up was to court and wed and bed disaster."
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"They were like two recovering alcoholics, hopped up on caffeine and Twelve Step gospel, telling each other how glad they were to be sober and then talking about nothing but drinking."
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