Lev Grossman

Quentin hugged him so hard that Eliot spilled his whiskey down his front, which he complained about loudly, but Quentin didn’t care. He had to make sure Eliot was real and solid. It made no sense that he was here, but thank God he was. Quentin had had enough of sadness and horror and futility for one day. He needed a friend, somebody who knew him from the old days.

And seeing Eliot here, out of the blue, for no reason whatsoever, felt like proof that impossible things were still possible. He needed that too.

He’d wanted to create something, make something new, be somebody new, but it was becoming apparent that he couldn’t, not until he’d dealt with something old. Not until he’d cleared his debts and laid his ghosts to rest.

Something had gone wrong, and more and more he was starting to think that the problem was him.

The old Quentin might have done it, but he wasn’t a creature of fear anymore, jumping at his own shadow, never knowing who he was or why. When he was younger it seemed like the only time he wasn’t afraid was when he was angry. He’d been so full of fear and self-doubt that the only way he could think of to be strong was to attack the world around him.

How could somebody like you create something that was alive? You’re a hollow man! There’s nothing inside you. All you could make was that cold, dead mirror-house.

This was my best thing. My best thing. I thought I would always have it, but I was wrong.

It was ending too soon, the way everything did, everything except Ebola viruses and really bad people like psychopaths. Those things never ended. How was that fair? Fuck it, it was stupid. Theories about life were always bullshit.

It wasn’t going to kill her, she thought. She would live. Of course she would, she didn’t have a scratch on her, for Christ’s sake. Everything was going to be fine. It was just that she would never have a home again.

She felt like a marble figure carved on a tomb, her own tomb. This body was her coffin. She breathed shallowly; even that was an imposition she could barely tolerate.

She would not indulge this body. She didn’t owe it anything. She wanted to feel it as little as possible