Sweetbitter

“Sweetheart, you can’t make a set of aesthetic decisions without making an ethical one. That’s what makes them fake people.”

“Aging is peculiar,” she said, moving a piece of parsnip around the plate with her fork. “I don’t think you should be lied to about it. You have a moment of relevancy—when the books, clothes, bars, technology—when everything is speaking directly to you, expressing you exactly. You move toward the edge of the circle and then you’re abruptly outside the circle. Now what to do with that? Do you stay, peering backward? Or do you walk away?”

But if you take art too seriously you wind up killing yourself.

“Do I need to justify myself all the time? Justify myself for being alive and wanting more?”

“You are hoping to master the experience. The pain is what we know. It’s our barometer of reality. We never trust pleasure.”

So anyway, I’m sitting there and it’s like, Lou-fucking-Reed, and I’m thinking, Thank you for teaching me how to be human, you know?”

My heart drummed. A voice said, You have to live with it. Another voice said, You made it, you made it, and at the same time, in a blistering chorus I said, Made it where? Live with what?

Let it change and then let it change you. That’s the only way to learn anything—you have to live with it.”

“We are creating the world as it should be. We don’t have to pay any attention to how it is.”

“Or maybe it means we’ve forgotten ourselves. And we keep forgetting ourselves. And that’s the big grown-up secret to survival.”